Near the beginning of "Unspeakable," Meghan Daum's first essay collection since 2001's "My Misspent Youth," Daum remembers a scene from the funeral of her maternal grandmother, whom Daum has painted, with a few diplomatic qualifications, as an unlikable fool. Daum notices that her own mother, herself terminally ill, has broken pensively away from the other mourners and is standing alone at the headstone. "I recognized my cue and walked over and put my arm around her," Daum writes, "knowing this would create a picture she wanted people to see and would therefore console her."

The layers of self-consciousness and calculation in those gestures have much to do with Daum's mother, a theater instructor whose theatricality wasn't confined to the professional realm, but it also typifies one of Daum's key themes, that of emotional authenticity and its absence or convolution. So much experience — especially touchstone events that are supposed to lure out our deeper selves — comes with what Daum calls "preassigned emotional responses." We're uneasy when we can't conform to "normal" ways of feeling, frustrated when we find ourselves going through the motions anyway, ashamed when our purest feelings reveal we're meaner and shallower than we'd like to admit.

And often we emerge from those big, life-changing experiences without feeling, well, changed. After suffering a nearly fatal infection born of flea feces (my takeaway: dogs off the bed), Daum finds herself "no wiser or more evolved" than before. Throughout the book, continuity trumps transformation. When a pregnancy at age 41 ends in miscarriage, Daum realizes that she remains, as ever, one of those people who have never really wanted children. In another essay, she admits that her talents and interests are narrow, and that she has come to believe, contra so much self-help literature, that the path to contentment may run through the oft-maligned "comfort zone." (She seems to think this is a transgressive view, but, at bottom, don't most of us share it?) "Stay in safe waters," she advises, "but plunge as deeply into them as possible."

At times one wishes Daum would plunge deeper. If some of her earlier essays were longer on honesty than on truly probing analysis of self, class and taste, these funnier, more relaxed pieces can seem curtailed. In an essay about her romantic history and the delayed start date of contemporary bourgeois marriages, Daum is spurred to consider that her lifelong quest for authenticity might be a form of romanticism, but she closes the discussion a page or two before it's been satisfyingly explored.

Perhaps that's asking "Unspeakable" to violate its principles. Just as these essays assiduously avoid shammed epiphanies, they dispense their ideas lightly, without extended exposition, grand conclusions or support from great books or recent developments in neuroscience. They're simply personal essays of the first rank, with a keen focus on the comedy and melancholy of early middle age in the artsy middle class. ("The only thing I could do now for which my youth would be a truly notable feature would be to die.") Daum's darker self-revelations never ask to be applauded for bravery; her jokes often call for recitation, and over the course of the book, her frankness, wit and intelligence create a bond with the reader that feels rather like friendship. Let's hope she keeps publishing these dispatches every 10 years for the rest of a long life.

Dylan Hicks is a writer, musician and author of the novel "Boarded Windows." He lives in Minneapolis.