So Vanity Fair has figured out Augusten Burroughs might’ve made stuff up, with Buzz Bissinger staking out the moral high ground: “I don’t know how [Burroughs] lives with himself,” he tells the Boston Globe about Running With Scissors, which details Burroughs’ life with his foster family. “They took him in and did their best, and he turned around and wrote about them in the most vile way possible.” Anybody could’ve told you an “exposé” of this sort would be coming from somebody, conveniently timed to accompany the release of the film version, ever since last January, when, jittered by the initial Fake Writer scandals, St. Martin’s scrambled to place disclaimers on its latest Burroughs release. Not to mention the way Smoking Gun editor Bill Bastone acknowledged that he was getting all sorts of fan mail asking him to take a look at the writer.
So, yeah, the somebody who finally got around to it was Vanity Fair and Bissinger. It’ll be perfectly well-written, no doubt, but you’ll forgive me if I’m perhaps a bit more interested in another story in that same issue, as Gail Sheehy and Judy Bachrach poke around in Mark Foley’s closet.