He has produced an intimate memoir that grabs you and found a new way to distribute it that reaches you.

Slater has called it "the most intimate memoir that any food person has ever written".

An album, a monograph and an intimate memoir by the author of "Maus," who witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center at close range.

Talbot also provided an outlet for unusually intimate memoirs and stark confessionals.

The result is "an intimate memoir masquerading as a far-flung exercise in natural and social history," Alida Becker wrote here last year.

"Washington insiders, however, sniff that it also alludes to the fact that she has hanged herself with this 'intimate memoir.' "

Somehow, it seems perfectly fitting that "Dreambirds" should turn out to be an intimate memoir masquerading as a far-flung exercise in natural and social history.