IT'S THE ASPIRING young middle-class writer's worst-case scenario. You get to college armed with pages of prose that capture the soul-sucking torpor of your suburban adolescence, only to find yourself in a writing class with a former child soldier who spent years fighting the Revolutionary United Front after his Sierra Leone village was torched and his entire family killed. And the guy can actually write!

I'm not saying this went on at Oberlin College where Ishmael Beah, now in his mid 20s, began to write about the experiences that would eventually make up the bestselling and much-ballyhooed "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier." But I've been in enough writing workshops, as a teacher and a student, to know what it feels like to have your literary thunder stolen by someone who actually has something to say. It seems like an especially unfair advantage at a small, private liberal arts college where, except for the lucky few who lost their virginity to their shrinks or who had Russian spies for parents, so many would-be writers are going to be pretty much stuck writing about summer camp.

But we live in a world full of not just summer camps but refugee camps and genocides and unimaginably violent civil wars. And now that Beah has turned out a coming-of-age memoir that makes even the most gothic childhood sob stories look like "The House at Pooh Corner," he may have closed the book on an entire literary genre.

I mean, what twentysomething self-respecting memoirist (if that's not an oxymoron) would want to get in the ring with a guy who not only survived the front lines in Sierra Leone but made it all the way to Oberlin — and majored not in English but political science? Even more vexing, Beah is attractive, well-spoken and does not appear to be adapting his book into a screenplay; he is serving on the Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Division Advisory Committee, which only makes many of his fellow memoirists look extra ridiculous.

Attention solipsistic young scribes: all the bad boyfriends, clueless parents and junior years abroad are no match for the child soldier. Better go back to whatever you were doing before you started writing about yourself. Just don't go to Starbucks, because Beah's book is being sold there, and you'll just feel worse.

I KNOW, I KNOW. There's room in the marketplace for all kinds of books and, as I have told students many times, you can write about something as banal as teeth flossing as long as you a) write it well and b) infuse the subject with some kind of universal relevance (flossing as a rite-of-passage metaphor, for instance).