Augusten Burroughs's Running with Scissors, published in 2002, became one of the bestselling memoirs of the 2000s and was adapted into a 2006 film starring Annette Bening, Joseph Cross, and Brian Cox. Marketed as a true story of Burroughs's strange and traumatic childhood, the book describes the years he spent — beginning around age 12 — in the household of his mother's psychiatrist, "Dr Finch," after his mother (who Burroughs portrays as having severe mental illness) effectively gave him over to the doctor's care. The book and the film made the unconventional Finch household famous, and they made a particular caricature of psychiatry famous as well.
The book has not aged simply. The real family on whom the Finch family was based — the Turcotte family of Northampton, Massachusetts — sued Burroughs and his publisher. The case settled in 2007. Burroughs has continued to defend the book as his account of his own experience. The publisher reclassified the book in some editions, with language acknowledging the dispute. The story is not just a memoir; it is now also a case study in the limits of memoir as a genre.
Running with Scissors is best read as one person's account of his own childhood, contested by the family it depicts, and as an artefact of how psychiatric care for serious mental illness was sometimes practised in the 1970s — not as a documentary about schizophrenia or its treatment.
What the book describes
Burroughs portrays his mother, Margaret, as a poet who experienced periods of severe psychiatric crisis throughout his childhood. He describes her psychiatrist's household as chaotic, unsupervised, and in places harmful to the children in it — including episodes of inappropriate adult-child relationships, casual drug exposure, and a rejection of normal schooling. The doctor in the book treats Burroughs and others using methods Burroughs portrays as bizarre, including readings of stool patterns and free-associative interpretation of dreams.
Burroughs writes the material with dark comic timing. The reading experience for many people was a kind of horrified amusement at the absurdity. The book was promoted as memoir — that is, as substantially true.
The Turcotte family's response
The Turcotte family — the children of Dr Rodolph Turcotte, on whom the Finch family was based — said that the book grossly distorted their childhood, fabricated events, and damaged their reputations. They filed a defamation and invasion-of-privacy suit. The case settled in 2007 with terms that included the publisher acknowledging the family's dispute in subsequent editions and Burroughs and the publisher agreeing to refer to the work as a "book" rather than as "memoir" in some materials. Burroughs maintained that the events he described happened to him.
This kind of dispute — in which the people on whom a memoir's characters are based contest the account — is not uncommon, but it is particularly fraught in books that depict psychiatric treatment, because the stakes for everyone's reputation and for the reader's understanding of mental illness are high.
What the book is and is not about
Although the book features a psychiatrist as one of its central figures, it is not really a book about schizophrenia or about the standard practice of psychiatry. The Finch household is, in Burroughs's portrayal, an outlier even by the standards of 1970s American psychiatric practice. The book's mother character, Margaret, is portrayed as struggling with severe mental illness; her diagnoses are not specified in the text in modern terms. The book does not, in any clinical sense, attempt to depict what schizophrenia is like, what evidence-based treatment looks like, or how families navigate it.
Readers looking for those things will find them better served by other books on this list — particularly Elyn Saks's The Center Cannot Hold, Esmé Weijun Wang's The Collected Schizophrenias, and Pete Earley's Crazy.
Why the book matters anyway
For all its controversy, the book had an effect on how a generation thought about mental health care. For some readers, it offered language for surviving childhood with a parent in serious psychiatric distress. For others, it reinforced suspicions about psychiatrists as eccentric or harmful figures. Both responses are worth taking seriously.
The book also raised, before it was widely discussed in publishing, the question of what readers and reviewers should expect from "memoir." After the James Frey controversy in 2006 and the Turcotte settlement in 2007, the publishing industry became more careful about labelling, fact-checking, and the line between memoir and embellishment.
What modern care looks like
Modern, evidence-based care for serious mental illness — including schizophrenia and other conditions that may have been part of Margaret Burroughs's picture — looks very different from the Finch household:
- Care is delivered by licensed clinicians within professional and ethical boundaries.
- Treatment combines medication, psychotherapy (including CBT for psychosis), and family or community support.
- Children are not handed to clinicians outside formal custody arrangements.
- Family interventions like the family psychoeducation model have an evidence base for improving outcomes.
If you are caring for a parent in psychiatric crisis, our pieces on caring for an aging parent and children of parents with schizophrenia may be more useful starting points.
Reading the book today
If you read Running with Scissors now, it is worth holding three things in mind:
- It is one person's account, contested by the people he wrote about. Read it as that.
- The Finch household is not a representation of mainstream psychiatric care, then or now.
- The mother character's mental illness is depicted through the eyes of a child who was hurt by it. That is a legitimate point of view, but it is not the only one.
Burroughs has continued to write — including a later memoir, A Wolf at the Table, and several novels. The Turcotte settlement effectively closed that chapter of his career as a controversy. The cultural artefact remains.
This article is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified mental health professional. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 in the US, or your local emergency number.