Running With Scissors by Augusten Burrows | The Book and Movie

The beginning: the book

Brian Cox played Dr. Finch in "Running with Scissors" the movie.

Augusten Burrows’ book “Running with Scissors: A Memoir” was published in 2002. Since then, a lot of money has been going in a lot of different directions. To print the memoir, which was later relabeled a book, money went out. Zillions of copies sold, and money came in.

“Running with Scissors” spent four weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list. Not long after the book was published, the powers that be started talking about making it into a movie.

Running to the big screen

Of course, to make a movie, money had to go out. It cost $12 million to make “Running with Scissors” into a movie. Unfortunately, not that much money came in. The film only made $7 million at the box office.

The movie producers lost out on the movie, but unfortunately for Augusten Burrows, “Running with Scissors” was about to cost him, personally, a whole lot of money. We’re not talking about a few hundred dollars like an online payday loan, either.

Later, the lawsuit

It wasn’t until after the movie came out that the family who served as the centerpiece for “Running with Scissors” decided to sue Augusten Burrows. The patriarch, Dr. Finch in the book and movie but Dr. Rodolph H. Turcotte  in real life, was dead but his family was alive and well and seeking cash.

Augusten Burrows wasn’t the only one named in the lawsuit. The publisher of the book was sued as well. The family asked for $2 million in damages for defamation of character and invasion of privacy. The family said “Running with Scissors: A Memoir” exaggerated and fabricated their lives.

Liable for litigation

Luckily Augusten Burrows and the publisher only had to pay lawyers’ fees and not the $2 million the Turcottes were seeking. They did have to agree, though, to change the word “memoir” in the author’s note to the word “book.” Wikipedia says:

Burroughs felt vindicated by the settlement. “I’m not at all sorry that I wrote [the book]. And you know, the suit settled– it settled in my favor. I didn’t change a word of the memoir, not one word of it. It’s still a memoir, it’s marketed as a memoir, they’ve agreed one hundred percent that it is a memoir.

Getting personal

Although the movie was basically a flop, the book remains high on many people’s lists despite its dark, sometimes disturbing plot. One review on Amazon wrote:

There is a passage early in Augusten Burroughs’s harrowing and highly entertaining memoir, Running with Scissors, that speaks volumes about the author. While going to the garbage dump with his father, young Augusten spots a chipped, glass-top coffee table that he longs to bring home. “I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a display of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor’s office,” he writes, “And it certainly wouldn’t be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours.” There were certainly numerous chips in the childhood Burroughs describes: an alcoholic father, an unstable mother who gives him up for adoption to her therapist, and an adolescence spent as part of the therapist’s eccentric extended family, gobbling prescription meds and fooling around with both an old electroshock machine and a pedophile who lives in a shed out back.