A Million Little Pieces Part II?

by Rachel Deahl, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 12/6/2006

The family depicted in Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs's bestselling 2002 memoir of a hyper-dysfunctional childhood, is telling its side of the story for the first time publicly in a Vanity Fair article coming out next week. The story will shine a national spotlight on accusations made against the author, his editor and his agent in a 2005 defamation suit filed in Massachusetts and raise broader questions about the ethical responsibilities of publishers.

Members of the Turcotte family (called the Finches in Burroughs's book) spoke extensively with journalist Buzz Bissinger for the story, which is titled "Ruthless with Scissors" and appears in the January issue. Bissinger writes that the family revealed their "shame and humiliation and unwanted exposure and helpless outrage" in a story that "is just as disturbing and shocking as Burroughs's story, perhaps even more so." (The Turcotte family, whose defamation lawsuit against Burroughs and his publisher, St. Martin's Press, is currently pending, said they decided to file suit when they heard a film was being made based on the book, and realized the story would therefore not be slipping into obscurity anytime soon.)

The Turcottes claim in their court case and in Bissinger's article that Scissors not only included harmful inaccuracies and embellishments, but also failed to effectively conceal the family's identity. Quoting the suit, Bissinger writes that "the author, with the full complicity of the publisher, literally has fabricated events that never happened and manufactured controversy that never occurred." The Turcottes claim this was done to make the book more sensational and, by extension, more commercial. A clerk PW spoke to at the Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge, Mass., where the suit was filed, said four defendants are named in the case: Burroughs; St. Martin's; Burroughs's editor Jennifer Enderlin; and Burroughs's agent Christopher Schelling. Schelling and St. Martin's declined to comment.

Bissinger told PW it's ultimately a case of "he said, they said" for the court to settle. The larger question, though, Bissinger said, is whether publishers and writers have a moral obligation to inform people that they're going to be depicted in a book. The Turcottes say they didn't know about the book until after it was published.