08/04/2005
Falling on Scissors
The hilarious author Augusten Burroughs, his publisher St. Martin's Press, his book editor, and his literary agent, are named in a lawsuit filed by the family portrayed in his best-selling 2002 memoir Running with Scissors
The Turcotte family alleges that events surrounding the Finch family, their fictional representations in the book, were sensationalized in order to better market it. The Turcottes claim that Burroughs has publicly identified them as the Finches. In Burroughs' memoir, he is sent to live with the Finches (Dr. Finch is his mother's therapist) when his unstable mother is no longer able to care for him.
At a sweltering, sold-out reading at New York's Cooper Union which I attended last month, Burroughs told the crowd that he was living again in the small Massachusetts town where the book is set and intimated that the family in the book was unhappy with their portrayal and that he was often hesitant when he went out for errands, afraid that he might run into them.
Posted 11:00 AM EST by Andy Towle in Print Media | Permalink
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I'm surprised Burroughs moved back to Northampton, but it was, and always will be, a great place to live. I always thought the book seemed very fictionalized and didn't believe too much of it while I read it BUT if you know the Northampton/Amherst area of Massachusetts (aka the Five College Area), there ARE families who are plenty wacky.
The chapter about predicting the future from human waste was almost too much for me.
Posted by: Ed | Aug 4, 2005 12:02:31 PM
I can remember watching TV shows and movies when I was younger and thinking, "There's no way that there are people out there who really live like that." Since I've moved to New York, I can't believe how many times I've experienced something or met someone so over the top that it feel like it would only happen in the movies.
I have to believe that non-fiction essayists like Burroughs and Sedaris do add a little something extra for dramatic (or comedic) effect, and I think readers understand that and aren't reading or expecting situations (even in non-fiction) to be 100% gospel truth. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that this lawsuit is coming from a very crazy family who is, perhaps, not quite as crazy as the one in the book, but still plenty crazy.
Posted by: Drew | Aug 4, 2005 12:52:58 PM
Ridiculous. Who assumes a memoir is an exact retelling of a life? For that matter, who assumes ANY report of any event or series of events is entirely accurate and unembellished, whether through willful fictionalization or the vagaries of memory? And unless the Turcottes are in the Witness Protection Program, I wouldn't have considered their identities a secret before Burroughs named them publicly (if he did in fact do that). Any person in the community who knew all the involved parties would have known who they were. I predict this suit will be thrown out.
Posted by: Tom | Aug 4, 2005 2:12:08 PM
That's interesting... I interviewed him on my blog back in May... And I asked him about how people feel about his characterizations of them... He never mentioned the Finches... But with those types of writings, you always assume things are trumped up on some level...
Posted by: rocka | Aug 4, 2005 3:35:30 PM
Am I the only gay man who doesn't "get" Augusten Burroughs?
I found "Running With Scissors" to be tedious and sad to the point where I just threw it away half-read.
Posted by: alan | Aug 4, 2005 3:59:14 PM
No you're not alone. I didn't get him too but I managed to finish the book. It was like he tried so hard to top the shock value of each succeeding chapter to the point were each single character became caricatures.
Posted by: gabe | Aug 4, 2005 5:25:15 PM
Trust me, every last detail happened. The Northampton/Belchertown/Amherst zone is rife with wigged out people like this. The area is reknowned for housing those who flee, or were purged, from the Boston metro region. I applaud his ability to cash in on their Birkenstock_Ghetto, SUV_Loving freakiness to further his psychoanlytic repair-sessions.
No other area, except perhaps Harvard Sq., has such a dangerous nexus of both white-n-naive college students with too little reality and too much of daddy's money joined by Jerry Ruben consumerist sell-outs. These places can only be described as very dangerous geographic-demographic traps for the ideologically lazy.
Every last of his words:
probably too, too true.
rob@egoz.org
Posted by: rob adams | Aug 5, 2005 5:46:01 AM