True Confessions : The latest entry in the genre of tell-all memoirs is the story of (no, really!) a book thief. : THE BLUE SUIT, <i> by Richard Rayner (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 216 pp.)</i>

Lately there has been a whole spate of “confessional memoirs” hitting the bookstores, and I must confess that I’ve devoured every one. Imagine--you get to experience sin without really sinning. Isn’t literature great? You get to feel what it’s like to be addicted to heroin (Jeffrey Stahl’s “Permanent Midnight”), you get to feel what it’s like to be addicted to risky sexual behavior (Michael Ryan’s “Secret Life”), and you now get to feel what it’s like to be addicted to pilfering rare first editions of John Donne and T.S. Eliot (Richard Rayner’s “The Blue Suit”). And can you believe it? Book pilfering turns out to be the most exciting of the three.

They say that confession is good for the soul, and it is clear that these books have an element of purging about them, of asking for forgiveness. In fact, in Ryan’s case, it sounds like something his therapist is making him do. But if you’re like me, you have plenty of friends with these sort of problems. You’re not buying the book to offer support but to be titillated, thrilled, entertained. It is this odd contradiction between the author’s motives and the reader’s expectations that make the confessional memoir such a tricky--and invariably disappointing--form.

Richard Rayner follows the classic model for such books. He begins with an epiphany (in this case an offhand remark made during the Los Angeles riots by his Finnish girlfriend) and then starts to look back on his life and crimes, trying to figure out why. Though his misdeeds may not be technically as bad as his literary competition’s, he more than squeaks by on charm and being British, rather like Hugh Grant (who, I get the feeling, definitely has the makings of one of these books in him). Rayner is, like all the ex-sinners, intelligent, well-educated, from a background of middle class but badly warped values. He lusts after success but is clueless about how to achieve it. He is full of insecurity, denial, self-doubt, yet at the same time quite full of himself. He is, in short, just like your average reader.

His story, which is pleasantly short and full of novelistic touches that work in its favor, involved such a confusing family history--fathers, stepfathers, imaginary sisters and brothers--that I would not for a moment try and sort out. All you have to know is that his father was a genteel crook and con man. When Richard goes to Cambridge, he starts to steal things. He breaks into suburban houses under the cover of darkness. He puts on the blue suit of the title and spends the day in London, forging checks. His motives are a combination of financial problems, post adolescent confusion and really bad migraines.

If your darker fantasies run in these directions you will be more than satisfied by Rayner’s taut descriptions of what it’s like to break and enter, to creep around a dark unfamiliar house, deciding what to take, listening for sounds, terrified but “high on crime.” My heart was pounding; it was almost too intense. The writing’s power comes from the simple fact that the reader keeps thinking: “Yes, that’s exactly the way I’d do it too.”

Rayner’s big obsession is stealing first editions from book shops, which may not be as exciting as creeping around dark houses, but it certainly gives the book the perfect Nabokovian touch. It’s so ironic it’s almost beyond irony. Yet confessional memoirs thrive on irony; you cannot spread it on too thickly.

“The Blue Suit’s” primary flaw is the same one that all these books share--too much boring family stuff. Tolstoy had it all wrong. Happy families may be all alike, but dysfunctional families are even more alike. True, there has to be a certain amount of this stuff because that’s clearly where the problem is coming from. But confessional memoirs have turned into the literary equivalent of a bunch of old ladies sitting around discussing their sciatica. To them it’s fascinating. To us, enough already. Luckily, if you read enough of these books you soon develop a sort of Evelyn Wood speed reading where you race right through the father’s latest psychotic episode, or the mother’s latest Blanche DuBois-type illusion, searching for the next crime or rape or fix or whatever.

A good confession needs to be told with a certain style, and Rayner comes up with an ideal one--low-key, urbane, understated, British. He’s graceful, beautifully paced--just about his only mistake is that he’s always naming whatever song happens to be playing at any given moment.

Sometimes the confessional memoirist chooses to tell his tale in the “lingo” of his former life, and I always think this is a big mistake. Jeffrey Stahl is the big offender here. He yells and screams in a sort of William Borroughs-inspired “junkie rap.” (But we must remember, he is a television writer.) Though it’s well done, it seems at odds with his status as “recovering.” Change the style as well as the behavior, that’s what I always say. To me this has always been Julia Phillips’ gravest error. Have you seen the picture on the back of her latest book? She’s still wearing her “junkie boots.” I can’t believe it. She got off coke, she cleaned up her act--now she should be wearing Chanel, like all the other women her age.

The truth has a tremendous amount of power. It also has a tremendous amount of tedium, episodes that go nowhere, people who appear only to disappear and much too much pointless brooding. I’ve always felt that Carrie Fisher had the right idea. Fictionalize it. Turn it into art, or whatever it is that Carrie Fisher writes. That way you can tie up all the loose ends, get rid of all those extraneous characters, come up with something resembling a plot, resolution, denouement, structure. After all, isn’t that the whole point? To turn all those awful things that happened to you into something bigger, something more meaningful? Something that might bring a big movie sale? The truth may be the truth, but when it comes to writing, it’s really just raw material.