In his ever-evolving show-business career, Bob Odenkirk has been a sketch-comedy star and a leading man of drama; a very bad lawyer and also that same lawyer making all the choices that would send him down that corrupt path. Now he can add memoirist to his résumé: Random House said on Wednesday that it had acquired a book of personal essays from Mr. Odenkirk that the publisher described as “a comic exploration” of his life and work. The book will trace Mr. Odenkirk’s trajectory from Second City in Chicago to “Saturday Night Live,” “The Ben Stiller Show” and “Mr. Show With Bob and David,” as well as his role as Jimmy McGill (a.k.a. Saul Goodman) on the AMC crime drama “Breaking Bad” and the prequel series “Better Call Saul.”

Mr. Odenkirk said in a statement that his book will be “a comic ‘bildungsroman,’ if you will — defined by Webster’s Dictionary as ‘a novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character’ — except this will be more memoir and the main character, Bob Odenkirk (actor, writer, comedian, gadabout), doesn’t grow morally or psychologically.”

It was announced earlier this year that Mr. Odenkirk is also developing an AMC mini-series based on “The Night of the Gun,” a memoir written by the New York Times columnist David Carr.