Sarah

The national bestselling first novel by a virtuosic young talent.

Cherry Vanilla, twelve years old with a penchant for short leather skirts and make-up, has one dream: to become the most famous 'lot lizard', or truck stop whore, in the business. With his blond curls and his naked ambition he is determined to be more woman than most, and to match his idol, rival, and mother, Sarah. Adopting her name and sex, he heads off into the dangerous and fantastic worlds pocketed away in the West Virginian wilds. On his journey for fame he meets with sinister pimps, luck-restoring Jack-a-lopes, superstitious prostitutes who take him for a saint, and a host of bizarre and beautiful outcasts that make up his unusual, heartbreaking world.

Born in 1980, J.T. LeRoy was first published at the age of sixteen. LeRoy has written articles and stories for Spin, NY Press, Shout, The Stranger, and several anthologies, under the pseudonym Terminator, and is also the author of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, a collection of stories. The author lives in San Francisco.

Cherry Vanilla, twelve years old with a penchant for short leather skirts and make-up, has one dream: to become the most famous "lot lizard," or truck stop whore, in the business. With his blond curls and his naked ambition he is determined to be more woman than most, and to match his idol, rival, and mother, Sarah. Adopting her name and sex, he heads off into the dangerous and fantastic worlds pocketed away in the West Virginian wilds.

On his journey for fame he meets with sinister pimps, luck-restoring Jack-a-lopes, superstitious prostitutes who take him for a saint, and a host of bizarre and beautiful outcasts that make up his unusual, heartbreaking world.

"JT LeRoy's deft and imaginative first novel is astonishingly confident. His language is always fresh, his soul never corrupt [and] turns the tawdriness of hustling into a world of lyrical and grotesque beauty."Catherine Texier, The New York Times Book Review

"J.T. LeRoy's deft and imaginative first novel is astonishingly confident. His language is always fresh, his soul never corrupt [and] turns the tawdriness of hustling into a world of lyrical and grotesque beauty."—Catherine Texier, The New York Times Book Review

"What was William S. Burroughs up to at the age of 20? Perhaps turning out the kind of prose that graces the pages of Sarah, [an] edgy but thoroughly engaging first novel . . . larger than life . . . comically Dickensian."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Wildly imagined, but described with a quiet sureness . . . Sarah's considerable originality testifies to LeRoy's wonderful ability to make up beautiful things."—Jonathan Taylor, The Village Voice Literary Supplement

"Never can I remember a debut this impressive, by someone this young . . . This is a writer to watch. His fire is leaping up out of the homeless shelter lot and onto the picket fences of our expectations. A marvelous, pungent, very vibrant conflagration."—LA Style

"Sarah is weird, darkly funny and haunting. J.T. LeRoy has a gift, to be able to articulate his world so clearly and astringently, with grace and humor, but without glossing over the pain and brutality of it."—Suzanne Vega

"J.T. LeRoy's Sarah is a revelation. It makes you realize how overused words like original and inspired have become. LeRoy's writing has a passion, economy, emotional depth, and lyric beauty so authentic that it seems to bypass every shopworn standard we've learned to expect of contemporary fiction. This is a novel gripped by an intense, gorgeous, yet strangely refined imagination, and its experience is unforgettable."—Dennis Cooper

"This book glows with perverse imagination and linguistic prowess. It hypnotized me. I couldn't help entering its magical world or surrendering to its desperate, comic characters. These truckers, their prostitutes and their pimps are on hilariously ruthless survival trips, but even so, they are full of humanity. The protagonist is a brilliant, resourceful adolescent set adrift in a world of grifters, and he is unforgettably touching and poetic."—Bruce Benderson, author of James Bidgood

"Like a cross between Nathanial West and Mark Twain, drunk out of their minds and collaborating on Charlie's Angel's meets The Headless Horseman—Sarah is a wildly comic tour de force and a brilliant debut."—Mary Gaitskill, author of Two Girls, Fat and Thin

"I am profoundly impressed by this amazing, absolutely brilliant new young writer, this JT LeRoy. His first novel is one of the most beautiful, shocking, disturbing pieces of fiction I've seen in years. You won't believe it until you've read it. It makes Bastard Out of Carolina seem like a day at the beach. But like that book, it too is crafted from careful, perfect language and buoyed up by a spirit so strong as to draw tears from my eyes."—Lewis Nordan, author of Lightning Song

"Jeremy LeRoy writes like Flannery O'Conner tied to the bed and plied with angel dust. Sarah is an exhilarating, hysterical and beautifully written disturbing novel. Whatever young LeRoy had to live through to write a book like this, we're lucky he's here. An off-the-map brilliant, brutally funny debut."—Jerry Stahl, author of Perv: A Love Story and Permanent Midnight

"Scary, sad, and way, way out there, LeRoy's picaresque debut novel follows a young boy through southern truckstops, where lot lizards turn tricks for drivers whose tastes run from women to transvestites to boys in jeans. Sarah is actually the name of our hero's mother, and in the beginning they both work for Glad, a fairly nice pimp who treats his whores decently and serves them up to a not-too-rough clientele. But when the boy appropriates his mother's name and gender (at least in appearance) to go wandering, he winds up in the clutches of a really bad guy named Le Loup. The gory details of how Sarah is abused by this monster and his cohorts will come as no surprise to those familiar with LeRoy's journalistic pieces (in Spin, Nerve, New York Press) under the pseudonym Terminator, some of which dealt with his own experiences. It is disturbing to encounter a 20-year-old who knows this much about life's seamy side, but LeRoy depicts his damaged, degraded characters with considerable tenderness."—Kirkus Reviews