"I grew up in the middle of the country in the middle of the golden age of the American middle class," says Jonathan Franzen in the opening essay of his memoir The Discomfort Zone. The pages that follow are a meandering, heart-string-yanking, self-effacingly honest meditation on a life chock-full of commonness. It is a chronicle of the relentlessly average beginnings of a writer whose skills are anything but.

Franzen's story of his life begins with the writer as an adult, just after the death of his mother. Alone in his mother's empty home, he starts breaking down and packing up all the framed family photographs in order to "depersonalize the house" before selling it. With this act of stowing away the past (and ultimately facing the inevitability of one's own death), Franzen begins his scintillating exploration of his own life.

We meet the young, Peanuts-infatuated Franzen ("I was a small and fundamentally ridiculous person"); the awkward, nonsexual adolescent (a founding member of a nerdy high-school prank club, and an eager participant in an early '70s pseudo-communist Christian youth group); and a first draft of the writer as a young man (learning about sex, German, and Kafka at Swarthmore). The final essay returns to the recent past, tackling his life pre- and post-divorce through an exploration of his interest in birding.

This memoir is decidedly nonlinear. Rather, it’s enriched (and held together) by all the associations that glom onto the past , making a collection of fragments from long ago into a living, breathing self. Amidst bittersweet recollections, you'll find an appreciation of the works of Charles Shultz and a funny evaluation of Gore-era environmentalism. Throughout, however, Franzen's knowing irony and mastery of electrifying yet tangential details can make the hairs on your neck stand up.

-Stephen Dougherty