A.J. Benza's tagline as the host of E! Mysteries & Scandals provides the title of his memoir Fame: Ain't It A Bitch, which covers his days as a top New York Daily News gossip columnist. Benza became notorious as the "regular guy" gossip, but for all his incessant boasting about shooting the breeze with Jack Nicholson, doing favors for mob buddies, and bedding supermodels, there's a curious crack in his tough facade when it comes to talking about his actual job. There's just nothing dignified or macho about tracking down the secrets of a celebrity's love life, and when Benza writes lines like, "[editor Martin] Dunn and I hit it off from the jump… the very first story I came to him with was my contention that figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was carrying on an affair with her very married manager Jerry Solomon," the mixture of street attitude and girly titter is hilariously incongruous. It's hard to believe that "A.J. Benza" isn't a character created as a front for some other person, but he's real, and his story does have appeal beyond the kitschy bluster. For three or four years in the mid-'90s, the night-owl scribe was at every hot party in New York, making friends with people that he'd have to decide whether to savage in print the next day, and it's hard to not want to hear the dish. Give Benza credit for being honest, as well. Fame: Ain't It A Bitch deals bluntly with the author's many scams and lies as an up-and-comer, and with his growing inability to hurt the people he was schmoozing once he reached the pinnacle of his profession. But Benza seems to lack fundamental self-awareness. He insists that he's not a liar in one chapter, then runs down some of his biggest lies in the next; he goes on about what a great writer he is, then delivers tin-eared lines like, "You can imagine that noise did nothing to make me enjoy my cereal any better." Most of all, he can't seem to see the connection between his scuzzy, self-centered behavior and the cosmic payback he receives: He blames the loss of his job, his girlfriend, and his professional stature on the karma of gossiping, not on his generally loutish treatment of women and colleagues. The memoir ends before Benza moves to L.A. and becomes a humble, basic-cable-level celebrity, but at least it goes on long enough for him to describe his efforts to get over his unemployment by popping Vicodin and crying to Dionne Warwick. "It sounds like real pussy shit and it was," he confesses. It sure does, but then, breaking "the big story" of Mariah's marriage troubles wasn't exactly manly work, either.