Bissinger vs. Burroughs
Posted by: Keir
Ah, memories. Remember when James Frey (A Million Little Pieces, My Friend Leonard) was carried through the streets of New York on the shoulders of an adoring crowd, then crowned King of the Memoir by a teary Patricia Hampl (I Could Tell You Stories)–only to be later chased to the docks, dodging a bombardment of soggy vegetables, by a reading public outraged at being duped yet again?
Well, I don’t remember that, either, but I’m not going to let that stop me from including the above scenes in my memoir, I Remember Reading.
Anyway, apparently Buzz Bissinger (Three Nights in August) is attacking Augusten Burroughs for the paucity of fact (or the oversupply of truthiness) informing Running with Scissors (you know, that book that everybody, probably even you, suddenly seems to be reading on the bus).
The full story will appear in Vanity Fair next week, but Bissinger was kind enough to give the Boston Globe a sneak preview:
“I don’t know how [Burroughs] lives with himself,” Bissinger told us yesterday. ” ‘ Running With Scissors’ contains little strands of fact that were wildly embellished, and if you take those away, you don’t have much of a book.”
Bissinger thinks that Burroughs “betrayed” the Turcottes, the family Burroughs’ story is based on.
“They took him in and did their best, and he turned around and wrote about them in the most vile way possible,” he said. “It’s totally gratuitous.”
The Turcottes are, natch, suing Burroughs for defamation.
I was about to call this “a good, old-fashioned literary dust-up,” but the possibility that Burroughs is actually defaming well-intentioned people takes a little bit of the fun out of it. I guess I’ll just have to relish the Bissinger vs. Burroughs bout and hope that our legal system protects the innocent and punishes the guilty, whoever they might be.
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August 30th, 2007 at 11:32 am
[...] The Turcotte family has settled their lawsuit against Augusten Burroughs and St. Martin’s, reports the Boston Globe (”Family settles with ‘Running with Scissors’ author, publisher,” by Rodrique Ngowi): Burroughs and his publisher, St. Martin’s Press, agree to call the work a “book” instead of “memoirs,” in the author’s note and to change the acknowledgments page in future editions to say that the Turcotte family’s memories of events he describes “are different than my own,” and expressing regret for “any unintentional harm” to them, according to Howard Cooper, an attorney for the family. He said financial terms of the settlement are confidential. [...]