'Scissors' case cuts deep in book world
Too much fiction and not enough -- that's the paradoxical allegation at the heart of a libel suit against the author, agent, and publisher of the bestselling memoir ''Running With Scissors."
When an author writes potentially embarrassing things about people in a memoir but changes their names, how far does he have to go beyond that, if at all, to hide their identities? Authors, editors, agents, and publishers will be watching this case, because it has implications for all of them.
''It's one of the trickiest issues a publisher faces, particularly when you're talking about autobiography, where concern for the participants in an author's life must be balanced with the author's right to tell his own story," said Concord lawyer Lois F. Wasoff, a publishing specialist and former corporate counsel for Houghton Mifflin Co.
''It's not just a legal concern, it's an ethical concern, and every writer has to approach it differently," said Helene Atwan, director of Boston-based Beacon Press. ''If you're writing about your own life, maybe you can disguise people so that outsiders will not recognize who you're writing about, but people may recognize themselves. Even if you're changing names, you want to be true to facts so that you don't say something hurtful."
The suit alleging defamation, invasion of privacy, emotional distress, and fraud was filed in Middlesex Superior Court by six members of the Turcotte family of Northampton, who maintain that they are the family of the eccentric psychiatrist with whom author Augusten Burroughs lived in his teens. Burroughs renamed them the ''Finch" family in the 2002 book, which is being made into a movie.
In the book, Dr. Finch and his family engage in bizarre behaviors such as studying their feces, eating dog food, and exhuming a dead cat. The author is sexually assaulted by a live-in patient, and the doctor helps him avoid school by faking suicide with alcohol and drugs. Finch has a special masturbation room off his office and allows his 13-year-old daughter to have a sexual relationship with a man.
The Turcottes contend that Burroughs fabricated or grossly exaggerated behaviors and events, portraying the family as ''an unhygienic, foul, and mentally unstable cult engaged in bizarre and, at times, criminal activity." At the same time, they complain the book so closely describes the late psychiatrist Rodolph H. Turcotte and his family -- even giving directions to the family home -- that everyone in the area knew who they were, subjecting them to humiliation and ridicule. The complaint also says Burroughs disclosed the Turcottes' name in an interview with People magazine, which published it in a Sept. 23, 2002 story about ''Running With Scissors."
Turcotte, who died in 2000, was a Santa Claus look-alike and founder of a vague organization called the World Fathers Association. (In the book, ''Dr. Finch" looks just like Santa Claus and wears a ''World Fathers Association" button.) In the 1980s, Turcotte lost his license to practice medicine.
Susan Winters Smith, the organization's president, is preparing a biography of Turcotte, and though she would not comment on the lawsuit, she stoutly defended his name by e-mail.
''Throughout his life," Smith wrote, Turcotte ''encountered problems with the establishment, as might be expected for someone who is an 'outside the box' thinker, and an 'outside the system' doer. He eventually lost his license to practice medicine, which was probably inevitable since he habitually broke 'the rules' in the development of his own system, sometimes clouding the boundaries between 'patient' and 'doctor.' Some people labeled him too eccentric (he was actually proud of being a maverick), but many people found him a great comfort as well as a source of wisdom."
The film version of ''Running With Scissors," being made by ''Nip/Tuck" producer Ryan Murphy, is due out next year, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Vanessa Redgrave, Annette Bening, and Alec Baldwin. The complaint says the film will be ''devastating" to the Turcotte family.
Neither Burroughs, the Turcottes, publisher St. Martin's Press, nor filmmaker
The usual reason to change names is to protect privacy. Atwan said that some authors of nonfiction books on medical subjects -- such as Beacon Press's Danielle Ofri, who wrote ''Incidental Findings: Lessons From My Patients in the Art of Medicine" -- go to extraordinary lengths to hide the identity of their subjects. Ofri, said Atwan, ''is meticulous in changing things so that no one will recognize her patients. She often asks them whether she can write about them, and in one case she gave a patient a manuscript to read. At the same time, she tries not to change details that would change the truth of the story."
Changing the names of people who look bad in a book can be risky, however. ''Fictionalizing stuff is sort of like shooting the king," says Boston lawyer Joseph Steinfield, a specialist in media and First Amendment issues who teaches at Boston College. ''You'd better make sure he's dead." In other words, if you're going to hide someone's identity, ''get it right or you may be worse off," because ''the implication is that what you are writing must be something bad, that you were feeling guilty."
However, Wasoff says, in a memoir it is extremely difficult to guarantee that people aren't identifiable, especially with major figures in a person's life, who would be known to others because of their relationship to the author. With such a person, Wasoff said, ''even if you change hair color and say he went to Dartmouth instead of Yale, you have to confront the possibility that the person will be recognizable." Given that possibility, she said, the publisher ''has to make the decision to trust the author that what he is writing is truthful. Truth is a defense in libel."
Whatever the exact facts of Burroughs's experiences in the ''Finch" home, there's little question that his writing reads like fiction, as many reviewers pointed out in 2002. The book is filled with scenes in which dialogue, gestures, and the movements of people are described so minutely as to suggest that the author must have a nearly photographic memory for things that happened 25 years ago. In interviews, he has said that he relied on detailed journals he kept as a child.
The movie ''Running With Scissors" is in ''postproduction," a spokeswoman for TriStar said, which means filming is done and editing is in progress. The film is mentioned in the Turcotte suit, though the producer is not a defendant. What does a moviemaker do, after production but before release, when someone alleges libel and defamation in a book upon which a movie is closely based?
It may not have to do anything. The legal arrangements between publisher and filmmaker aren't known in this case, but Elaine Rogers, a Boston lawyer who specializes in book-to-movie deals, said that in a standard agreement ''the author makes representations and warranties that the underlying story will not infringe upon anyone's rights in terms of privacy or defamation. Most studios and production companies will ask for those clauses."
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com. 
