Gaga (aka Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) says in the book - which NotW doesn't identify - that she got hooked on drugs because she wanted to be like the artists she loved: "Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol - and I thought the only way to do it was to live the lifestyle.

"But then I realized my father's sister Joanne, who'd died at 19, had instilled her spirit in me. She was a painter and a poet - and I had a spiritual vision I had to finish her business."

Gaga had originally dropped out of performing-arts school in NYC and had become a cokehead.

"My cocaine soundtrack was always the Cure," she said. "I would lock myself in my room and listen to 'Never Enough' on repeat while I did bags and bags of cocaine.

During an LSD trip, Gaga even convinced herself that she'd met Radiohead's Thom Yorke.

"Lady Gaga" was born when Germanotta was performing at a New York nightclub and got ticked off by talking patrons. She decided to take off her clothes and play piano dressed only in a bra, panties and fishnets.

"That's when I made a real decision about the kind of pop artist I wanted to be," she said.

Her stage name came when record producer Rob Fusari told her that she reminded him of Queen's Freddie Mercury and confused Lady Gaga with the Queen hit "Radio Gaga."

* In other bio news, Jack Canfield made a bazillion dollars writing the best-selling "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series.

Absentee father Jack, alas, never fed any of that soup to his son, Oran.

Nick Duerden, of the Independent, reports that Oran, after time as a heroin addict, now plays in an atonal noise-metal band called Child Abuse, and yowls songs like "I Hate Me."

Oran told the Independent, "I guess I've always been drawn to playing really loud music. It's therapeutic, cathartic. And I needed the outlet, because I don't express anger all that well."

To express his anger a different way, Oran also wrote a memoir (titled either "Long Past Stopping: A Memoir" or "Freefall: The Strange True Life Growing Up Adventures of Oran Canfield.")

It's about Mexican cops introducing him to drugs at age 13 and dropping acid with Jerry Garcia's daughter at age 14. He writes about his self-help guru dad's work being a sham.

What snapped Oran out of his heroin haze was the drug ibogaine (illegal here, but the subject of a recent "Law & Order: SVU" episode), which eventually sobered him up enough to write.

Irony: Dad has been supportive of the book. Mom, whom dad left when Oran was 1 and she was pregnant, has called the book "false-memory syndrome" (another "L&O:SVU" episode).

Tattbits

* We don't think our Big Fat Friday cover story on Amanda Seyfried can take all the credit, but "Dear John" beat "Avatar" and took in an amazing $32 million this past weekend.

* E! News reports that former Miss California Carrie Prejean, 22, has become engaged to St. Louis Rams QB Kyle Boller, 28.

Good luck to them both.

Daily News wire services contributed to this report.

E-mail gensleh@phillynews.com