Blurring the Boundaries

Nasdijj wasn't on my radar before last January; until LA Weekly came out with "Navahoax," Matthew Fleischer's incisive, thorough-going smackdown of Tim Barrus's created persona, I wouldn't have thought I would have any special interest in the man or his work. Like anyone reading the news, I had registered the stories about James Frey and JT Leroy, but Nasdijj's story resonated for me not so much because of the literary scandal angle, but because it involved such an intense act of creation for such a fraudulent purpose; it was more akin to the stranges tales told by Binyamin Wilkomirski and Lauren Stratford than to Frey's frat-boy posturing.

Barrus, after all, didn't just write as Nasdijj -- he performed him, convincing lecture audiences at universities and credulous fans at book-signings that he was everything his books said he was and more. He carried out extensive correspondences, did online interviews, and even enlisted his clearly long-suffering wife into the charade -- her account of their travails during a book tour, "2004 A Hell of a Year", turned up on a rather touching, earnest books-and-reading site on which Nasdijj also appeared (that site's editor's crestfallen response to the Nasdijj revelation echoed those of many readers who had placed stock in his tales of suffering and survival). That piece leaves me wondering even more about him, and them -- did he really have avascular necrosis, the "bone disease" she writes about (as does he, elsewhere)? Did she, on any level, believe what he wrote, or did she just go along, as it were, for the ride? In an article last May in Esquire, she is portrayed as trying to pass off their dog (who appears as a leitmotif throughout both of their writing) as a service-animal -- is she as much a grifter as he?

I found myself scouring the Net, the Google cache, Usenet, you name it, for traces of Nasdijj's writing, especially the blog content that seemed to come and go on a daily, sometimes an hourly basis. Sometimes it was lucid prose, poetic, illuminating, wry, even witty; sometimes a screed that raged incoherently about injustices large and infinitesimal. Often it was deeply disturbing (a point of pride, it seemed), turning around and turning back to and never straying all that far from a few themes: the horrors of modern publishing; after his "reveal", a mixture of pride and anger at the whole question of identity; and, inevitably, a complex mixture of sex, violence, boys, and how Nasdijj relates -- as savior, as predator, as desired and desiring -- to all three.