Sorry. I lied in order to get your attention. There will be no naked Paris Hilton (not here anyway). However, this has a lot to do with her.

If I would ask you to imagine a victim, pictures of poor children with bloodied faces and muted shouts would scorch your mind and tug the strings of your sympathetic hearts. I don’t look like a stereotypical victim. Not only am I a victim, but I am also quite proud of it. It’s like belonging to an exclusive member’s club where the only way to join is by falling in the net of what the tabloids called “the greatest literary hoax in living memory”.

The hoax in question is the body of work produced by the author J T LeRoy. Most people probably don’t really know much about this brief episode of literary history. The whole story is very American, J T LeRoy (J for Jeramie, T for Terminator) was hailed as the finest example of the rags-to-riches quality America believes it has. LeRoy, we were told, was a male cross-dressing prostitute whose childhood was fucked up by his mother who used to pimp him at truck stops. He ended up on the streets of San Francisco, a HIV-positive heroin addict on the verge of death. LeRoy wrote his first novel, Sarah, when he was only 19 under the inspiration and drive of his psychiatrist as a form of therapy. His novels always referred to his indescribably awful childhood and put earthy experiences into words. Everything he wrote was made to seem autobiographical.

There’s only one problem… J T LeRoy doesn’t exist. He never existed. The 19 year old boy was actually Laura Knoop, a 40 year old female punk rocker who used to be a sex writer. She wrote as LeRoy for the last ten years while her half sister was the public face of LeRoy who always wore sunglasses and a blonde wig.

As her victim, I am neither mad nor angry. J T LeRoy, a hoax or not, is a good writer. The experience of reading my first LeRoy novel was unbelievably emotional and powerful; his work is one of the best pieces of modern literature I have encountered. While his stories take you on an emotional journey, the language is always fresh and even magical – full of the little details that turn a story into something else, a truth. Even when now revealed as false, LeRoy’s stories are beautiful pieces of fiction. Fiction doesn’t have to be true to have a value. Humanity’s greatest writers wrote work that was entirely fictional and literature in itself is often seen as a triumph of the power of our imagination. In literature, the truth doesn’t matter.

The problem doesn’t lie with the LeRoys of this world but with the adoration of the celebrity so prominent in our culture. John Strausbaugh, former editor of the New York Press summed my point up “Here's this middle-aged woman who's not getting anywhere as a writer. She reinvents herself as a girly boy and becomes a huge success. On whom does that reflect more poorly, her or all the rest of us?"

Paris Hilton (here we go…) is famous for being famous. We live in an age where people are paid to look beautiful and the triumph of form over content is far behind us. We admire the celebrities that shower us with glamour while plastered onto billboard signs and ask their autograph as if their signature was a pound of their flesh. Footballers and models who are not even able to write without the help of a ghost writer get paid millions in publication deals while the talented writers get turned down everywhere they turn.

Something is rotten in our kingdom but I am not here to preach- simply to point it out. At the moment, I am only an observer (and an occasional victim). In Trauffaut’s Jules et Jim, the new wave cinematic masterpiece, Jim tells the story of how he became a writer. His professor told him that he must become an observer and the young Jim replied “that's not a profession”. His wise professor looked at Jim and said “Not yet. Travel, write, translate. Learn to live everywhere. Begin at once. The future belongs to the curious”.