Talking to Sonia Manzano feels like catching up with an old friend.

Some of the familiarity comes from the fact that Ms. Manzano played Maria on “Sesame Street” for 44 years. Naturally, a wave of sadness and nostalgia followed news of her retirement from the show, which she mentioned in an almost offhand way during a speech in July at the annual conference of the American Library Association. Her listeners “gasped and they tweeted it,” she said on a recent Wednesday over lunch, at a modest Mexican restaurant in her Upper West Side neighborhood. “I always say I meant to do it five years ago, but I forgot.”

Though she’s no longer working with the Muppets — besides playing Maria, she was also a writer for the show and won 15 Emmys for that work — it does not mean that she’s idle. Ms. Manzano’s memoir, “Becoming Maria: Love and Chaos in the South Bronx,” a chronicle of her journey from an impoverished childhood amid domestic violence to adulthood, was released in late August.

Ms. Manzano, 65, who already has a novel under her belt, as well as two children’s books (a third, “Miracle on 133rd Street,” is out on Sept. 22), said she had always been a fan of memoirs and was especially taken with “Angela’s Ashes,” by Frank McCourt. “What was so striking about it was that it was such a sad, miserable experience, yet it was so funny,” she said. “That kind of laughing at the absurdity of the situation you find yourself in was really appealing to me.”

Ms. Manzano had been considering a memoir at least as far back as 1995, which is the date on an early manuscript in her closet. “I’ve been working on this book for so long that my parents have since passed,” Ms. Manzano said. She responded wryly to condolences offered solely for the loss of her mother. “I have a feeling I’m going to find myself defending him,” she said of her father, who was abusive. “That’s the difficulty of being a kid — when you feel two things at the same time.”