After the publication of Jonathan Ames’s first novel, “I Pass Like Night,” he took his parents to therapy.

“We went to a family counselor, talked about what was real in it, what was not real,” he said. “After they weathered that, they realized people don’t pay that much attention to what somebody else does. The neighbors might for a moment be like, ‘Oh, Jonathan’s awfully strange,’ and then, ‘Oh, hey, I’m behind in my taxes.’ People care more about their own lives than other people’s lives.”

Sixteen years later, Mr. Ames, 41, no longer unnerves his family with his peccadilloes. Instead, his transgressions and neuroses – recounted in a matrix of autobiographical and fictionalized stories that he shares onstage and in print – have won him a loyal fan base.

“Most writers are a mess, like me – those of us who are middlingly successful. We have the days to write, barely can pay the rent, and then don’t write very much. And then at night – at night is when I perform, kind of like a bat or something. My temperament for performing is different from my human temperament.”

When he hosted a farewell evening of readings and music at Fez last month, to mark the club’s closing, Mr. Ames was in “bat” mode. He performed a “reverse striptease,” remarked on his late onset of puberty, and near the end of the night, strapped on a plastic set of female genitalia called a “mangina” and re-created Matisse’s “Dance” with two other similarly clad men.

In his introduction that night, Mr. Ames also made self-deprecating jokes about his receding hairline. Balding is a favorite theme among his rotating series of embarrassing stories; he shared a diagram of his changing ‘do with David Letterman during a 2003 appearance on “The Late Show.” Perhaps that’s because some of his other favorite topics aren’t fit for network television.

The program he assembled for Fez show featured performances by many of his fellow members of the downtown smart set. Among them were comedian Jessi Klein, pregnant New York magazine columnist Amy Sohn, human sound-effects machine Zero Boy, “Little Gray Books Lectures” host John Hodgman, pointy-eared East Village fixture Reverend Jen, poet Hal Sirowitz, and burlesque dancer Julie Atlas Muz.

Not all writers who are funny on the page are funny onstage, and hardly any comedians are nimble writers. Mr. Ames is both. He estimates that he reads publicly four to six times a month – an extraordinary schedule for a working writer. This month, his appointments include readings at Cooper Union, the New School, two branches of Barnes & Noble, and the New York Public Library. He is on the board of the storytelling organization the Moth, for which he frequently plays host. And now that Fez has closed, he expects to become a regular at a still-unopened venue on Avenue A, owned by the founder of the Howl! Festival and owner of Two Boots Pioneer Theater, Phil Hartman.

Over breakfast near his Boerum Hill apartment recently, Mr. Ames was in his “human temperament,” fully clothed and subdued. The day before, he had flown in from Los Angeles, where he is working on several television projects. He found out in January that a sitcom he wrote and starred in for the cable network Showtime was not optioned to become a series, but the pilot will air this year or next. “They’re doing a series based on the movie ‘Barbershop,’ which might have taken my place,” he said, with none of the bitterness one might expect from a man who is paranoid about his hair.

Mr. Ames is also writing the screenplays for his two most recent novels, “The Extra Man” and “Wake Up, Sir.” Adaptations of both books are currently in development. “Right now, all my valuable creative energies – if you can somehow put that in quotes, ‘said with sarcasm’ – are being poured into the more lucrative fields of screenwriting, so that I can survive.” He said that he enjoys the process, but added, “It might not be as rewarding as novels, because novels stick around and people have them for two weeks, and a movie you go to for two hours.”

By that measure, Mr. Ames’s books have provided readers with at least three full months of pleasure. His first novel was bought while he was a senior at Princeton University and published in 1989. For the next decade, he worked as a taxi driver, taught composition classes at Berkeley Business College, and began performing regularly at Fez. He has published a book biannually since “The Extra Man” came out in 1998.

His latest book is “Sexual Metamorphosis” (Vintage, 319 pages, $13.95), an anthology of memoirs by transsexuals. It includes excerpts from accounts by celebrity sex-changee Christine Jorgensen (formerly George Jorgensen), professional tennis player Renee Richards (Richard Raskind), activist Mark Rees (Brenda Rees), and Bond girl and Playboy model Caroline Cossey (Barry Cossey).

Mr. Ames’s fictional protagonists would be eager readers of the collection. In the 1998 novel “The Extra Man,” the Ames stand-in, Louis Ives, spends many of his nights at Sally’s, a 43rd Street bar for pre-operative transsexuals that was once a favorite of the author. Ives also finds help making himself up like a woman by scanning advertisements in New York Press, for which Mr.Ames used to have a column. (He said he hasn’t looked at the Press since editor John Strausbaugh was fired in 2003.)

The main character in last year’s critically praised novel, “Wake Up, Sir,” pores over Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 “Psychopathia Sexualis.” Case 129 is included in “Sexual Metamorphosis.”

Aleshia Brevard, whose account of her transformation during the 1960s is included in the anthology, once hit on Mr. Ames in a Pennsylvania bar. She asked him, “Where have you been my whole life, baby?” – thereby indicating that the male bad-pickup-line gene cannot be destroyed even by surgery.

That’s the kind of the scene Mr. Ames will almost invariably retell (as he did in the anthology’s introduction). “I think I’m the type of writer that draws on autobiography and I think I’ll continue to do so,” he said. “Maybe someday I’ll be more expansive. I do include other people, but I tend to find that I work best from a first-person vehicle, taking a weird aspect of my personality and then expanding it into a character – kind of like those shrinky dolls that might be tiny and then you pour water on them and they grow.”

Like David Sedaris, another writer who draws material from his condition as a perpetually hapless outsider, Mr. Ames has reached a certain crossroads. How does one write about oneself after becoming the sort of figure that people recognize on the street? Though he classifies himself as a struggling writer – “Some people are born under a financial star and some people are born under other stars” – Mr. Ames is starring in television pilots, writing screenplays, and headlining at packed performances.

It’s this dilemma that pushed Mr. Sedaris to move to France; his fitful mastery of the French language and customs have rendered him an underdog again.

As for Mr. Ames, his indignities are often physical, not psychological. He is free to stay in New York and age ungracefully, gamely braving the kinds of offenses faced by authors of remainder bin books, best sellers, and prize-winners alike.

“There’s always new stuff to write about, new traumas, new embarrassments,” he said. “I’m not seeking them out. I’m not actively seeking impotence, but when it comes … I’ll write about it.”

Jonathan Ames will be reading on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble Astor Place, 4 Astor Place at Broadway, 212-420-1322; admission is free.