When I pick up the phone and there's no sound on the other end, it's JT LeRoy.

After I read his debut novel, Sarah, I started an e-mail correspondence with him. He sent me raccoon penis bones collected from roadkill along Southern highways--gifts unique to the novel's story line--along with fine, bittersweet chocolate, which I made into a rich mousse. Now, he calls me and tells me stories about living in San Francisco: dinners with Gus Van Sant, making out with the Hedwig guy. JT's 21 and he sounds like a girl, with a twangy accent acquired from life with his grandfather in West Virginia. He says that Tom Waits called him brave for sharing the stories in his new book, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, and he murmurs into the phone, "Do you call a shark brave? I write because I have to."

When I talk to JT, I get the feeling that if I were a lactating mother, enough milk would spill from my compassionate mammary glands to flood a small room. Like any good hustler, JT makes me feel like doing something, anything, to help him. And so I followed him into this new collection of interconnecting, autobiographical short stories. They read like a novel with jump cuts in between--the narrator, Jeremiah, leads a disjointed tour through the brutal personal hell of his adolescence. Born to a 14-year-old mother, he is adopted by a loving family, but then his mother's family sues to get him back. Jeremiah's grandfather, a preacher, gives him a religious education, while the mother returns occasionally to take him on long, crazy road trips. "I was just a wild animal by the time I reached 12," writes LeRoy.

The most interesting stories occur when the reader gets into Jeremiah's strange reality--like in the story "Coal," when Jeremiah, deprived of food except for Canada Dry and Pringles, shops with his increasingly unbalanced mother at a Piggly Wiggly: "The pink sportswear spy couple is next in line. She keeps grinning down at me, catching me staring at their Chee-tos. 'It's poison, all poison,' I chant silently to myself, louder than my rumbling stomach. Then, like a true demon, the woman reaches for a Hershey's bar from the rack above the conveyor belt, opens and bites into it. Hershey's can be safe sometimes, but now I know it's a trick because the chocolate smell sinks into me."

When explaining tampons in the story "Baby Doll," Jeremiah reflects his mother's own issues: "She bleeds because men are thinking evil thoughts about her, including, and especially, me. So I have to walk to the canteen and buy her Tampax with the plastic applicator to stop the bad thoughts. They sit on the back of the bamboo shelves above the toilet, pink and thin and ready to absorb all evil."

When I ask JT about how difficult it must have been to make stories out of these terrible experiences he has had, he responds in an e-mail message with the subject line, "sorry this took so long. I am havin a hard time right now with the book."

"When we went back a year ago for final edits on the work," he writes, "I just couldn't deal with some of the stories because of the content in there. A lot of those stories I hadn't read in like five years or so. I really wanted to not publish some of them, leave stuff out, because I felt it was just too exposing and too intense.... I mean the stuff I write about was written as therapy. To have to own it in public is very exposing, humiliating somewhat, and scary. I guess the statement is the fact that I'm still alive. When I'm writing I'm the most sane and less self-destructive."

JT's working with Gus Van Sant to turn Sarah into a movie. "Gus Van Sant is wonderful and has really taken me under his wing, really mentoring me. He chose Patti Sullivan to write the screenplay and she is fucking incredible. I think it's going to be really visually beautiful, because Gus is like that, as an artist." JT's also writing new stuff, less autobiographical, and he notes that "it's really cool to work on projects where I can stretch, write stories that are not my experience."

A few weeks ago, I sent JT another e-mail message with more questions, and I still haven't heard back. JT, if you're out there... hi.