Growing up gay in East Texas might be enough of a challenge for some people, but Robert Leleux had a hysterical, self-absorbed mother to contend with as well. In The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, Leleux details his wild, horrifying and often hysterically funny childhood. It was the mid 1990s, and Leleux’s parents had just split up. Overnight he went from a comfortable, pampered life to a white-knuckle existence, his days filled with his mother’s increasingly desperate attempts to snag a new husband.

There was the time, for example, that she said she was hemorrhaging from her feminine parts because of an overdose of birth control pills. (“You’ve got to get me to the hospital. My thing’s still bleeding.”) After a wild break-of-day ride in the Jaguar, it turned out she was getting breast implants and didn’t trust him to see a trip to the plastic surgeon’s as quite the emergency she did. (“I’m working very hard,” he told her, “to decide whether or not you’re having a nervous breakdown. Or if you’ve always been crazy and I’m just now waking up to it.”)

Catch Leleux’s reading today and see why the newly released Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy is being hailed as the debut of the year. 7 p.m. Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet. For information, call 713-523-0701 or visit brazos.booksense.com. Free.

Tue., Jan. 15, 7 p.m., 2008

This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2008.