by JULIET WATERS

If the early leaders in the race for this year's hot young writers is any indication, this will not be a good summer for excess.

Anyone who gets through James Frey's A Million Little Pieces may find themselves thinking very seriously, and in very short sentences, about the consequences of severe addiction. Described as the War and Peace of addiction, Frey's macho memoir takes us through the worst moments of life in rehab. Root canals without anaesthesia, rules against talking to the opposite sex, and this: "I leave my Room and I walk through the Medical Unit where nothing has changed. There are bright lights, there is whiteness. There are Patients and Doctors and lines and pills. There are moans and screams. There is sadness, insanity and ruin. I know these things and they no longer affect me. I walk into the Lounge and I sit down on a couch. I'm alone and I watch television and the latest batch of pills kicks in." Apparently they force you to write your memoirs on a keyboard with a sticky shift key. That or random capitalization is his way of being different.

Dry, by Augusten Burroughs, gives just as cheery a picture of rehab. He goes to gay rehab, which he imagines beforehand as something decorated by Ian Schrager: "Spare rooms, sun-drenched, with firm mattresses and white, 300-count Egyptian cotton sheets." Needless to say, Proud Institute is nothing like that. Burroughs's memoir is just as dark as Frey's. But it is, at least, much shorter and funnier.

The 23-year-old Frey works so hard at being authentic that his writing feels tight and contrived. The 24-year-old Burroughs, an advertising whiz-kid from the age of 19, has never been anything but contrived. So it's ironic that his writing sounds more authentic.

To be fair, Burroughs already has one shocking, prodigy memoir under his belt. Last year's bestseller Running with Scissors was a smash hit with critics. The nightmarish story of how his mother sent him to live with the family of her psychiatrist where he was repeatedly raped by a neighbour, was described as "hilarious," "compulsively entertaining," "amazing" and "screamingly funny" in the leading U.S. newspapers.

Frey has had some very positive reviews, and you'll be seeing this book in second-hand university bookstores for many years to come. But equally classic is Janet Maislin's satire of his writing (www.nytimes.com), which includes her 12 steps to writing a recovery memoir.

Dry would be worth reading even if it weren't one of the summer's hottest titles. It's worth reading even if you're not a recovering alcoholic. Burroughs has beautifully mastered the trick of writing the light-hearted dark memoir. Like Frey, his enemy throughout the recovery process is not the cheerless environment of rehab, but the moronic cheerfulness of recovery sloganeering. Somehow pseudo-Christian self-immolation has become the methadone of alcoholism. Both Burroughs and Frey end up fleeing the relentlessly shallow and obvious brainwashing techniques of the 12-step process.

The triumph of Frey's story is that he kicks his severe and chronic alcoholism without AA. Believing in himself, his ego and his will-power, he defeats the million-to-one odds of recovery without therapy or groups. He walks proudly away, an Individual.

The triumph of Burroughs's story is that, although he sees AA clearly for what it is, he recognizes his desperate need for shallow brainwashing, instant intimacy and support. As one character puts it, the best way to get rid of bubble gum is with more bubble gum. You admire his ability to reach out for help, given how badly help has betrayed him in the past. And you admire his writing. Even when he's conforming to the standard rules of capitalization, his individuality shines through every literate and interesting sentence.

A Million Little Pieces by James Frey,
Doubleday, hc, 382 pp, $34.95

Dry by Augusten Burroughs,
St. Martin's Press, hc, 304pp, $36.95