On many insomniac nights, when I’m trying to quiet the voices in my head, I listen to stand-up comics. I’ve been back and forth through Netflix’s roster: the blue-collar and the big city, the clean and the crude, the capital-W woke and the close-to-canceled, the ironists and the oafs, the oldies and the mere pups.

Rock critic Greil Marcus has said he plays comedy albums while he writes. I have no idea how that might work. But perhaps we’re not so far apart. I use congenial stand-up routines — especially after I know them a bit, when they’re worn in — to settle my mind down.

For months my favorite has been Leanne Morgan, a Tennessee-born comic, whose special is called “I’m Every Woman.” Morgan has a regal, self-deprecating, ex-beauty queen, seen-it-all manner onstage, one that reminds me of certain Southern and Appalachian women I’ve been lucky to know.

Morgan comes on like the family member you hope to be seated next to at dinner: the one for whom life is fundamentally a comedy and not a tragedy, the one who doesn’t need liquor on her breath to be anybody’s fun aunt, the one who makes any conversation seem like a little conspiracy between the two of you.

She’s a red-state comic who doesn’t touch politics. Instead, she unloads in public about private and sometimes squeamish things: perimenopause and its discontents, hemorrhoids, breastfeeding, the size of her undergarments (“you could use them to fight a bull”), Jell-O salads, weight gain and the “nasty” things men still want in bed when their wives are long over it. She’s working in the tradition of Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers and Roseanne Barr, among others, but she’s got a spark that’s her own.

Morgan has a memoir out, titled “What in the World?!: A Southern Woman’s Guide to Laughing at Life’s Unexpected Curveballs and Beautiful Blessings.” As soon as I saw it, I knew I was going to read it.

At this point you may have questions. For example:

Is this one of those top-tier comic’s memoirs, like those from Tina Fey, Trevor Noah and Steve Martin, where you sense the author might have taught at Brown if the whole comedy thing didn’t work out?

No, but it’s got a frazzled charm, and it works.

Is it as funny as Morgan’s stand-up?

Not quite. The hard thing about trying to be funny on the page, as opposed to in front of an audience, is that you lose your delivery, as Calvin Trillin has said. Morgan’s sweet-toned Southern accent has bestowed on her a world-class delivery system.

But “What in the World?!” has a lot going for it. It’s the twisting, up-from-nowhere story of a working-class woman who went from helping her husband sell mobile homes to sudden success relatively late in life. I devoured it in two sittings.

Morgan grew up in small-town Adams, Tennessee, about 45 minutes north of Nashville. Her parents ran the only grocery store. Her mother presided at the counter, Winston Light in one hand, can of Tab in the other, while her father cut meat in the back. He got so good at it that he sold the grocery store and opened a meat-processing plant behind the family’s house.Morgan didn’t mind that, except for the smell, which she describes as “sage-infused death.” It clung to her clothes. I wish I had space here to print her mother’s method of quickly skinning a deer, which involved a rope tied around a golf ball.

Morgan was an extrovert, pretty and boy crazy. After high school she wanted to marry a cute young tobacco farmer and commence having children. But her father gave her two options: the military or college. She attended the University of Tennessee. With her teased hair she looked like a member of the band Bananarama, she writes, while other girls seemed to have stepped out of “The Official Preppy Handbook.”

She married the wrong guy and divorced at 23. She worked a lot of dead-end jobs in malls, including at a Lancôme counter. (“I loved it, but those French words were really hard.”) She waited tables at Applebee’s.

She met her husband, Chuck, while they were working together at another restaurant. He’s the strong, silent type. (“Chuck believes in suffering.”) She deplores his habit of grabbing one of her breasts, out of the blue, and holding onto it. Chuck is the good-natured butt of many of her jokes, though she prefers the word “butthole” — it’s her go-to put-down.

Chuck refurbished mobile homes, and later began to sell them. They lived in one for a while. Slowly he became successful, traveling for a major national retailer.

Morgan knew she was good at getting people to laugh. She had few chances to demonstrate this until she began to host parties to sell high-end costume jewelry, as if it were Tupperware. Was this part of a pyramid scheme? It didn’t seem that way to her.

She was good at it. She began to get “bookings” to appear at other women’s houses. This led to performances at Rotary and Kiwanis clubs. She did her first professional set at a comedy club in Knoxville, Tennessee, in her mid-30s, but for two decades she mostly put away comedy to raise her three children.

She emerged again in 2020, when she was 55, after some clips of her material began to go viral on social media, including one called “When you go to concerts with old people,” about staring at the Def Leppard lead singer’s hernia. She did a 100-city tour and is at work on a Netflix sitcom series with producer Chuck Lorre.

“It’s hard to describe the feeling of killing onstage,” she writes. “It’s like you’re plugged into the sun.” In this memoir, her sunny side is usually up. The best thing about the book, though, may be its darker aspects. There’s a moving and well-made chapter about being dumped by her best friend.

That friend had grown up sheltered, Morgan writes, “so I had to teach her about secular things, like camel toe.”

Comedy on the edge of pain is Morgan’s specialty. She’s Appalachian, and over the elegy.