To commemorate the event, in addition to We the People, Edward Norton's HBO documentary that brought a tear to Obama's eye (aww, remember when everybody loved him?), campaign manager David Plouffe has a new memoir out called The Audacity to Win.

Writing about a race that included days that felt like "having your legs amputated in the morning and your arms at night", Plouffe's might be the more interesting of the two projects, especially as the excerpt suggests he doesn't feel the need to mask his true feelings about a great many issues. For example:

He was shocked by how serious Obama was about Hillary Clinton -

Neither Ax nor I were fans of the Hillary option. We saw her obvious strengths, but we thought there were too many complications, both pre-election and postelection, should we be so fortunate as to win. Still, we were very careful not to object too forcefully. This needed to be his call.

Eventually, Obama decided threesomes weren't his thing and inviting Hillary to the table would almost certainly bring Bill as well.

When you're in a room with Biden, only one man does the talking. And that man is not you.

Evan Bayh was so perfect, it was kind of creepy. And Tim Kaine was a nice guy who thought it was nice of them to meet with him but even he knew that it was a long shot.

Obama didn't think it was a great idea to start knocking Sarah Palin right off the bat. Plouffe disagreed but said alright.

"Look," I told him, "simply say that you're adding your own personal voice, one principal to another." He acknowledged that he understood and would watch his words. "We'll send out a personal statement from you and Biden," I said, "but it's important you not suggest we misfired on the original statement. Don't throw the campaign under the bus."

So guess what Obama did? He threw them right under that bus.

These are probably not the sort of things you're likely to see in We the People, which comes from a much simpler place:

Amy Rice: I watched his convention speech in ‘04 and I was really impressed with what he had to say. I felt for the first time that he was a politician of my generation. And if you think back at that time. the country was so divided. and he was saying something new and something different. "We're not blue states, we're not red states, we're the United States." I bought his book and read his story. and he has an incredible, modern-day story, and that's how the idea was conceived.

Edward Norton: When I watch it, one of the first things I saw that I was most pleased about was that it succeeded as a film apart from access to Obama. I think when it really started to gel for me is when these guys showed it to me, and things like the Iowa section-I really had never understood caucus politics until I saw it.

But taken together, the two perfectly feed the still-simmering fascination with the Obama campaign, even if the Presidency has taken the shine off Barack.

"'I started to sneak food. I borrowed the car and went to the supermarket, and then . . . ate three yogurts in a row, followed by a bag of popcorn or half a pack of Fig Newtons," she continues. "And, though I knew by this time how to make myself throw up (a skill the man had taught me), I couldn't get rid of everything I took in. I ceased to be so thin. Maybe I was a normal weight, but I felt gross, unlovable and ashamed.'

"In her memoir, 'At Home in the World,' the former New York Times writer described how she moved in with then 53-year-old Salinger when she was 18, and how he'd take her into the bathroom, ranting, 'You can't let this junk sit around putrefying in your intestine,' and make her vomit." [P6]

Since the senior Robison died in 2005, he won't have a chance to refute Burroughs' portrait with a memoir of his own like the rest of his family. The eldest Robison was a popular professor of philosophy, respected by his colleagues and students, who suffered from severe psoriasis. Like his son, he was an alcoholic. The darker side of Professor Robison comes out in a particularly trying moment from A Wolf At the Table, as described by the Times:

...Mr. Burroughs describes a fight between his drunken father and his brother that took place when Mr. Burroughs was 10. Certain that it would end in one of their deaths, he runs to his brother’s room, grabs a rifle and then shoves it into John Elder’s hand, screaming, “Kill him, kill him, kill him.” John Elder raises the gun and points it until his father walks away. The next day, John Elder, who had left home for good, returns to teach Augusten how to fire a gun on his own so he can protect himself.

Burroughs' story  is undercut by John Elder Robison's version, a rendering complicated by his Asberger's Syndrome, which causes him to struggle with a lack of empathy, among other symptoms.

On the phone Mr. Robison said, “I didn’t see that same scene as a particularly monstrous event.” The rifle was a BB gun, he said. A teenager “looks at that scene and it’s almost comical,” he said. But to a child, “it’s menacing, and his big brother seems able to protect him.” John Elder acknowledges that because of Asperger’s it is often difficult for him to decipher emotions and meaning and says he think his father possibly shared some of his autistic traits. “Sometimes I can’t see the subtleties of behavior,” he said. “My brother is the opposite of that. He’s overdramatic.”

Their mother has no memory of the gun incident or her husband dousing his cigarette on his son's forehead. She plans on weighing in on the rest of her son's book in her own forthcoming memoir.

A Son Peers At Father And Finds A Sociopath [NYT]

Chapter Ten of A Wolf At The Door [Augusten.com, PDF]