Which would you choose? I guess I'd choose the latter - and am actually stuck with both. So in my case, it's a moot point.

I've been reading Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs - a memoir - for my book club. And it's the first memoir I've read, in this current memoir crazed world. And I went into it expecting great things, a new-ish form of writing, something to suggest innovation and so creativity of some sort.

And I arise from the ashes, patience sorely tested, ready to ream into this book for not delivering on it's promise. This is not a memoir. It's gossip. A Dear Diary of a really, really sad life, but unlike Anne Frank's diary, it's not literature.

The premise is a good one. A patently (I have issues with why good bodily hygeine gets to signify gay-dom so blatantly - I thought we were past that) homosexual 11 year old is given away to his mother's psychiatrist to live in dire circumstances in a household that screams insanity at every turn. At heart it's a story of a bunch of kids gone wild without parental supervision. Those adults that are there may as well not be, and the one's that are gone couldn't care less. It's a book you almost chastise your soul for hating.

Now Augusten, the kid, is homosexual by dint of his perfectionist mentality, neat-freak nature. Ok, hackneyed, but we'll buy it for now.

He suffers through mad parents, the father is as interesting as cardboard and is hinted to as 'evil' without actual elaboration. And his mother is a modern day Sylvia Plath. I'm still reserving judgement at this point.

So, he gets to this house where a naked six year old takes a dump on the carpet, there are roaches on the kitchen counter and other mad people 'in house', and has a little freak attack initially, but within a page he is smiling at their madness. What?!!! Where's the wigging out by the gay boy who combs his hair all the time?! At this point I'd got this horrible feeling that I'd been had.

And he enjoys the freedom, stays out of school because the crazy psychiatrist says all kids are adults by thirteen and should make their own decisions and gets banged by the adopted 31 yr old son who has all the hall marks of a psycho sexual predator.

And I'm supposed to look at all this and feel, what, exactly? If it's a thinly veiled moral tale, it's got all the relevance of the six o'clock news on Fox. Do you know where your kids are? Yes, at home and in my ovary - now leave me the hell alone.

The book itself is a nasty piece of voyeurism, alternating between random acts of insanity like making a hole in the kitchen ceiling in one night and lewdness - the doctor has a 'masturbatorium' in his office where he goes to do the dirty between patients. He goes to show Augusten this when lo-and behold his daughter is taking a nap on the couch in the masturbatorium. Yes, random acts of irrelevence and just plain old yuckiness. I'll spare you the pages of description and action surrounding bowel movements lest you are not close enough to a bathroom to wash your mouth out.

The story never stops to take a breather and tell us why all these gory details are necessary. I'm all for horrible scenes but they have to mean more than just good gossip.

And that's the horrible feeling I got, that I had just spent valuable time reading all these details of a teenager's life and I might as well have been flipping the vacuous pages of Us Weekly. I'd have been visually stimulated at least.

Yes, I get it- it was all real. But the writing is atrocious, just simple and in places left me with the feeling that I wanted a red pen in my hand. No 'voice', no craft, no art was applied to the writing of these pages - it took a typewriter and a really good memory with poor imagination applied to the telling and voila, it was done.

That being said, he's written a few more and two are being turned into a movie. Including this. I hope the other books are better, but I'm not reading them anytime soon.