from Mary Gaitskill: what SHOULD have been quoted in the New York magazine article

To the Editors:

Considering that Stephen Beachy's article on JT Leroy is about lack of authenticity, it does have a certain small but strange feature: while I have in fact met and spoken with JT Leroy, I have never met or spoken with Stephen Beachy--and yet a reader of the article would reasonably conclude that I had. I wrote the description of my meeting with JT years ago and it was not meant to dispute his account of the same meeting, which was also written years ago. His account does not contradict mine, nor state that he spent lots of time staring into my eyes; one can see what a person's eyes look like, and notice that they have a pimple in, well, seconds.

Mary Gaitskill