A Life Less Ordinary

Q: When you watched the film, did it make your past seem more real or more removed?

A: I went into [the film] with some distance. What I wanted was for it to capture the soul of the book and I really didn’t want it to be quirky or kooky. I wasn’t prepared to be so sucked in and hit so hard. There’s an early scene with a fight between Alec Baldwin and Annette Bening, who play my mom and dad, and it was really difficult. It took me right back to that moment.

(Picador USA)

Q: Why did you think Ryan Murphy was the right person to adapt the book?

A: At first I didn’t. In the first place, I really thought that only 10 people would read the book, so its success was totally unexpected. A lot of people expressed interest in adapting it, but I didn’t want a film version to come out that was horrible and would just ruin me. Then Ryan got in touch with me and just kept calling and wouldn’t stop. I knew nothing about him, just that he had done this TV show called Popular that I had never seen. When we finally met, I realized that he understood the book on a really deep level and he knew my mother — his mother was a lot like my mother — so he really knew who she was. He just said all the right things. By the end of that lunch, I had given him my book.

It was a gut instinct to trust him and, of course, I didn’t know how it would turn out until the end. But when I saw the film, I was overwhelmed with gratitude. I have slipped through the cracks so many times and in so many ways in my life. Ryan didn’t let me slip through the cracks with this film.

Q: Although it’s your story, it’s Annette Bening’s film — she steals every scene she’s in. And because the movie shows us your mother’s perspective, she comes across as more sympathetic than in the book. Would you agree with that?

A: Yeah. You know, when I was a kid, everybody loved my mother. And she has lots of friends now who I’m sure think that I’m an absolute monster [for writing about her]. But they didn’t have to live with her.

In so many ways in this film, Annette is my mother. Mental illness is often portrayed with a lot of histrionics but Annette really captured it quietly, with her eyes. Mentally ill people’s eyes are so different, so off. It was the most authentic performance of mental illness that I’ve seen.

Q: The film also captures how your mother’s struggles dovetailed with the frustration and anger so many women were feeling in the 1970s and that whole period of feminist consciousness raising groups and Betty Friedan and Anne Sexton.

A: It’s interesting that you would say that, because I was just talking about that with Annette and Jill Clayburgh [who plays Finch’s depressed wife] today. They were talking about that time, that shift from the 1950s, when being a housewife was seen as privilege, to the 1970s, when it was seen as a trap, and how disorienting that shift was.

A different sort of couch potato: Deirdre Burroughs (Annette Bening) receives therapy from Dr. Finch (Brian Cox) in Running With Scissors. (Sony Pictures)

Q: And it was also a period when people were experimenting with sex and all kinds of therapy and psychiatry.

A: Exactly. People didn’t know what to expect one minute to the next. The film does a great job with that, of depicting the 1970s without putting arrows or quotation marks everywhere — you know, “Look, there’s an avocado-coloured fridge! Look, everyone’s taking pills!” Like I said, I really didn’t want the film to be quirky with a capital Q. That wouldn’t have worked. But I wanted it to be authentic — and it was a strange time.

Q: I imagine the challenge with the film, as it must have been with the memoir, was how to balance the humour with the tragedy.

A: It was hard, but the humour is organic. It’s how I got through it. There were times that I did feel that I was in a pit of darkness, that things were so catastrophic that I had a physical sensation of pain. I still have issues. I still carry the emotional scars of what happened. I still fear being left. I don’t know how Dennis [Burroughs’s longtime partner] can stand it. So I had to focus on the absurdity of the situation, and I still have to now. It’s how I got through it. Humour was what kept me sane.

Q: Even before the James Frey scandal, you were very careful to note in your books that you had altered some details, that some characters are composites, for example. Given that, and the fact that you continue to write about your life, how do you really know when you’re being honest?

A: Part of it is that I use my journals for reference, and I ask the people who were there with me at the time. But honestly, I think you just know. You know when you’ve got at the truth. You have to be brave. You cannot be afraid to make a fool of yourself. You have to show yourself sitting on the toilet. With Frey, I think maybe he felt like he had to make his past bigger or harder. And I thought: “Why embellish? Your life sounds pretty bad as it is.”