When Ayun Halliday’s daughter was 5 years old, she came home from school one day chanting, “Dare to be Heinie, Dare to be Heinie, Dare to be Heinie, Dare to be Plump!” Ms. Halliday decided to embrace her daughter’s cryptic chorus as a kind of mantra, and today “Dare to be Heinie!” graces the end of every e-mail the author – most recently of “Job Hopper: The Checkered Career of a Down-Market Dilettante” (Seal Press, 256 pages, $14.95) – sends to her substantial fan base. It’s also the official slogan of the East Village Inky, Ms. Halliday’s seven-year-old, award-winning, quarterly zine that playfully chronicles the minutiae of a life with children.

The slogan perfectly captures the writer’s plucky ethos. In addition to her zine, which reaches more than 1,000 subscribers, Ms. Halliday, 40, is a columnist for the sassy feminist magazine Bust and has had three of her memoirs published in almost as many years. Her tone is irreverent and hilarious, but beneath the humor is a quest for authenticity – how do you stay true to yourself despite the demands of life?

On a recent afternoon, fresh back from a West Coast stop on her book tour, Ms. Halliday was the picture of calm. Relaxing in the sunny, Boerum Hill apartment she shares with her husband, the playwright Greg Kotis of “Urinetown” fame, and their two children, India, 7, and Milo, 4, her easy laugh and habit of drinking water from a mason jar made her seem more like a Southwestern poet than a Brooklyn author.

In fact, in 1988, after finishing a degree in theater studies at Northwestern University, the Indiana native decided to “quit theater for a lucrative career in poetry.” Instead, fate intervened in the form of a friend who told her about auditions the Chicago-based theater company the Neo-Futurists was holding for a new late-night show, “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.” The premise of the show was that the audience would see 30 original plays in 60 minutes, and that the performers would always appear as themselves, speaking directly from their personal experiences – excellent training for a memoirist-to-be. She was cast, and went on to spend the next 10 years with the group, creating new shows every Friday and Saturday night (and along the way meeting and marrying fellow troupe-member Mr. Kotis).

Her new book is an attempt to chronicle “the string of crappy day jobs” she held during that decade in order to support her successful, but low-paying, artistic endeavors. Each chapter captures one horrid stint after another – from nude modeling to working as a museum guard to playing Bert from “Sesame Street” in a crowded suburban mall – with remarkable, and sometimes unbearable, specificity. About an unsuccessful day as a substitute teacher trying to gain control of a classroom of first- and second-graders, Ms. Halliday writes, “This was what drowning must be like after one gives up thrashing around and succumbs to the quiet numbness of near brain death.”

Have any former co-workers or employers gotten in touch with her?

“Not yet,” she said with a genuinely nervous laugh.

The book is dedicated to “anyone with the business sense to major in theater” and derives much of its humor from making fun of her impractical, non-careerist past – but Ms. Halliday clearly wouldn’t have had it any other way. In her introduction she writes that she came to realize there was a method to her madness, that “we grasshoppers need not spend our entire lives shoehorning ourselves into the anthill.”

Ms. Halliday has kept herself very busy avoiding the anthill. After eight years in Chicago, she and her husband felt they were in a rut, so in 1996 they moved to the East Village to seek their fortune writing comedy for television and to start a new branch of “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.”A year later, at the age of 32, Ms. Halliday became a mother. After an entire life spent marching to the beat of her own drum, it was a rude awakening.”I’m not an idiot, but I genuinely believed that the baby would spend a lot of time curled at my feet like a kitten,” she wrote in her first book, “The Big Rumpus: A Mother’s Tale From the Trenches,” published in 2002.

“Although I was really happy to have this baby,” she said, “I felt really isolated.” Though she is a strong advocate of breast-feeding, Ms. Halliday wryly noted its big drawback: “You have to have the breast in proximity to the baby.” Nevertheless, she attempted to live her life as it had been before, even going to Edinburgh to participate in a performance workshop with her 6-month-old child strapped to her waist. It didn’t go well. The fact that her husband was there made the whole thing worse. “He was so free and could participate, and I was so not free and couldn’t participate, and it just broke my heart,” she said.

She felt she could either “completely spiral into the slough of despond,” or create something of her own. That’s when she began her zine, the East Village Inky.

“The zine was a really good training ground for writing,” she said. It taught her to “accept that you don’t get all that much more by waiting and sitting on something for two years, waiting for it to become perfect.” Instead, she said, “I write really quickly and I tend to be really satisfied by the first draft, and then the editor forces me to do a second draft.”

Sure enough, no sooner had she finished her first memoir than she was on to her second, the 2003 travel memoir, “No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late,” which describes her adventures traveling in foreign lands, including overseeing free elections in Cambodia and explaining tampons to Indian security guards: “It’s for ladies. Bleeding ladies.” All three of her books have taken her six months or less to write.

How much of that speediness is her nature, and how much of it is necessity since her time is limited by raising her children?

Ms. Halliday ran a hand through her long, dark, silver-streaked hair. “I think that for a writing mother, yeah, there’s a reason that most successful novelists tend to be young single men.” As if to illustrate her point, Milo started calling to her from the other room just then, begging her to come and look at the drawing he’d created on the computer. “I can’t stay up writing until 4 in the morning when these guys are up at the crack of dawn,” she said, gesturing to India, who was arranging marbles on the carpet near her mother’s feet.

But also underscoring the balance she has found was the ease with which she walked across the room, responded to her son’s creation – “Very good, Milo! Green eyes, pink eyes, and blue eyes. I like the one with the big mouth” – and then immediately returned to the question she had been answering without missing a beat.