It would be wrong to call Hollis Gillespie the female David Sedaris, but they could be a tag team. Besides writing short, funny and from the heart and sharing the embrace of National Public Radio, both have a hard-knocks sensibility that escaped the collegiate bland machine.

Confessions

In “Confessions of a Recovering Slut and Other Love Stories” (Regan Books, $24.95), Gillespie’s quirky essays are hyper-hyperbolic and artfully coarse, newspaper-column short yet digressive as a blotto drunk’s route home. Gillespie writes about gentrifying around the crackheads in her Atlanta neighborhood – one of them called her Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch, which became the title of her first essay collection – and about her fractious family and friends, “all flawed in the most fabulous ways.”

New for this book is Gillespie’s own single motherhood, which produces a bleakly comic masterpiece about childproofing a house against the stray gunfire of feuding drug dealers.

A bit of predictability forms around her unpredictability, and occasionally there’s a whiff of sitcom homily. But then she grabs you again, perhaps with an opening like this: “Grant is so afraid I’m gonna find Jesus that he sometimes reminds me of my atheist mother, who used to fend off Bible-wielding Jesus freaks with lit cigarettes.”