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This is a truly wonderful and unique book. Lazar's voice--conversational but concentrated, self-aware but entirely un-coy, and often just plain out funny-is unlike the voice of any other nonfiction writer I know, and his approach to his subjects is never hackneyed. He can write about such familiar topics as family, sexuality, culture and how they inform his sense of his own identity and identity in general and line by line, paragraph by paragraph, you never get that sense of "oh, he's taking X familiar line" that almost every writer gives. That's what I think the one of the blurbs means by describing Lazar as a writer's writer's writer: people who have read deeply and widely will perhaps appreciate this collection most, since they are most likely to understand the subtle brilliance that illuminates every page.