Hmmmm, here's an idea! Someone writes a thinly-veiled account of your family and depicts them as dysfunctional neurotics. That author publishes the book as fiction and you are pissed because you are convinced that everyone in your neighborhood knows that the book is really about you. You are shamed, humiliated... hmmmm what could be a solution? Ah, yes: FILE A VERY PUBLIC LAWSUIT! That way, even MORE people will read the scathing criticism, the embarrassing dirty laundry: THAT will soothe the pain.
What total idiots.
Augusten Burroughs is being sued over his semi-autobiographical novel Running With Scissors because the family he stayed with during his adolescence are horrified that he dared to reveal their bizarre, and at times truly unethical, behavior for the whole world to see. Excerpt from today's paper:
__________________________
That "Running With Scissors" has been a success is beyond dispute. The memoir made the New York Times best-seller list, and is now in production as a movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Annette Bening and Alec Baldwin. The TriStar Pictures film is due out next year.
. . . Burroughs, 39, an Amherst Regional Junior High School dropout, burst on to the literary scene with "Running With Scissors" in 2002. The book depicts several years of the author's early adolescence with a neurotic, chain-smoking, poetry-spewing mother and the Northampton family to which she turned him over.
The patriarch of that family (called "the Finches" in the book), is a Santa-Claus-look-alike psychiatrist who indiscriminately hands out pills to young Augusten, condones the boy's homosexual affair with an adult male client, and is blissfully indifferent to the squalor and bizarre goings-on in his home.
Other characters get similar treatment. The matriarch, "Agnes Finch," eats dog food and seems oblivious to the madness around her. "Hope Finch" buries her dead cat in the backyard, and then digs it up after claiming she heard it cry. "Natalie Finch" exposes herself to passersby, cuts a hole in the kitchen ceiling with Burroughs, and, in the words of the lawsuit, is described as "wildly lascivious and utterly lacking in any morals or judgment."
. . . In 1994, [the patriarch] was charged with trespassing after picketing Bill Cosby's Shelburne home in his Santa cap. Turcotte said he was trying to elicit Cosby's support for the World Fathers Association, an organization Turcotte claimed to have founded.
Earlier that year, state police stopped Turcotte in Whately as he was marching to Quebec in his Santa Claus cap in a self-styled "peace parade." Police said they temporarily detained the doctor out of concern for his well-being, but released him after a short while.
In 1989, Turcotte announced that he intended to run against then-state Rep. William P. Nagle Jr. for Nagle's seat in the House. He was interviewed by a reporter, but little became of the candidacy.
By that time, Turcotte had had his psychiatrist's license revoked by the state Board of Registration in Medicine after he was accused of turning over guardianship of his 13-year-old daughter to one of his patients. The patient, who was then in his 30s, was convicted of statutory rape of the girl in 1982.
_______________________
Okay, am I alone in planning to WHIP out to the bookstore and purchase the book RIGHT THIS SECOND?! It's the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family with sisters! It's the Royal Tannenbaums on peyote! (no small coincidence that Gwenyth Paltrow appears in this one too). I find it hard to feel pity for the elder Mr. Turcotte, who seemed to have confused the term psychiatrist with pimp-daddy.
I vaguely remember seeing the book on the shelves a few years ago, but I could have sworn it had a bright, sunny colored jacket and/or happy-slappy type style on the title, so I panned it. Now I may just purchase it to support Burroughs. For Christ's sake, his birth mother, a local poet, and his father, then a professor at UMASS Amherst,
gave him to the Turcottes to raise. What the FUCK was going through their heads????
<<<deep breath>>>
In any case, to get back to my original point, I find the irony of the Turcotte's public lawsuit quite amusing. I've got your back, Burroughs. And maybe I'll finally be called for jury duty!
PS: I chopped the back of my scary mullet-esque hairdoo this afternoon. Now I am a (temporary, please Lord) bell-head, which I suppose is better than a bell-jar, unless somebody fascinating is in me. I'm all over the double entendre tonight.
What total idiots.
Augusten Burroughs is being sued over his semi-autobiographical novel Running With Scissors because the family he stayed with during his adolescence are horrified that he dared to reveal their bizarre, and at times truly unethical, behavior for the whole world to see. Excerpt from today's paper:
__________________________
That "Running With Scissors" has been a success is beyond dispute. The memoir made the New York Times best-seller list, and is now in production as a movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Annette Bening and Alec Baldwin. The TriStar Pictures film is due out next year.
. . . Burroughs, 39, an Amherst Regional Junior High School dropout, burst on to the literary scene with "Running With Scissors" in 2002. The book depicts several years of the author's early adolescence with a neurotic, chain-smoking, poetry-spewing mother and the Northampton family to which she turned him over.
The patriarch of that family (called "the Finches" in the book), is a Santa-Claus-look-alike psychiatrist who indiscriminately hands out pills to young Augusten, condones the boy's homosexual affair with an adult male client, and is blissfully indifferent to the squalor and bizarre goings-on in his home.
Other characters get similar treatment. The matriarch, "Agnes Finch," eats dog food and seems oblivious to the madness around her. "Hope Finch" buries her dead cat in the backyard, and then digs it up after claiming she heard it cry. "Natalie Finch" exposes herself to passersby, cuts a hole in the kitchen ceiling with Burroughs, and, in the words of the lawsuit, is described as "wildly lascivious and utterly lacking in any morals or judgment."
. . . In 1994, [the patriarch] was charged with trespassing after picketing Bill Cosby's Shelburne home in his Santa cap. Turcotte said he was trying to elicit Cosby's support for the World Fathers Association, an organization Turcotte claimed to have founded.
Earlier that year, state police stopped Turcotte in Whately as he was marching to Quebec in his Santa Claus cap in a self-styled "peace parade." Police said they temporarily detained the doctor out of concern for his well-being, but released him after a short while.
In 1989, Turcotte announced that he intended to run against then-state Rep. William P. Nagle Jr. for Nagle's seat in the House. He was interviewed by a reporter, but little became of the candidacy.
By that time, Turcotte had had his psychiatrist's license revoked by the state Board of Registration in Medicine after he was accused of turning over guardianship of his 13-year-old daughter to one of his patients. The patient, who was then in his 30s, was convicted of statutory rape of the girl in 1982.
_______________________
Okay, am I alone in planning to WHIP out to the bookstore and purchase the book RIGHT THIS SECOND?! It's the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family with sisters! It's the Royal Tannenbaums on peyote! (no small coincidence that Gwenyth Paltrow appears in this one too). I find it hard to feel pity for the elder Mr. Turcotte, who seemed to have confused the term psychiatrist with pimp-daddy.
I vaguely remember seeing the book on the shelves a few years ago, but I could have sworn it had a bright, sunny colored jacket and/or happy-slappy type style on the title, so I panned it. Now I may just purchase it to support Burroughs. For Christ's sake, his birth mother, a local poet, and his father, then a professor at UMASS Amherst,
gave him to the Turcottes to raise. What the FUCK was going through their heads????
<<<deep breath>>>
In any case, to get back to my original point, I find the irony of the Turcotte's public lawsuit quite amusing. I've got your back, Burroughs. And maybe I'll finally be called for jury duty!
PS: I chopped the back of my scary mullet-esque hairdoo this afternoon. Now I am a (temporary, please Lord) bell-head, which I suppose is better than a bell-jar, unless somebody fascinating is in me. I'm all over the double entendre tonight.
[Edited on Aug 01, 2005 12:45AM]