For someone who claims to be forever a fixture of Hollywood underbelly’s -- as showcased in six seasons of her Emmy Award-winning reality show Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List -- the offbeat comic Kathy Griffin has amassed a collection of grade-A funny stories in her 2009 memoir "Official Book Club Selection.” Although she delivers with a consistently lewd and unapologetic brand of humor, the girls’s got range. She writes openly about serious subjects including her grandparents’ strict and comically flawed sense of religious devotion to their Irish-Catholic faith, her late brother’s struggle with drugs, and her admitted obsession with plastic surgery.

She takes readers on a tour of her early friendships with other well-known comediennes -- Lisa Kudrow, Janeane Garofalo, and Margaret Cho, among them -- and spills the beans on her relationships with men including Jack Black, Conan O'Brien, and Matt Moline, from whom she had a painful divorce. A chapter consisting of email correspondences between Griffin and Apple founder Steve Wozniak is not the book’s best, but it’s got its charms. Griffin, always in search of the Oprah seal of approval, named it “Official Book Club Selection” in a characteristically cheeky and aspirational move. In the excerpt below, you’ll detect Griffin’s ability to sincerely detach from and laugh at her wacky insider-outsider perch on Hollywood’s fringe.