“I LOVE my scar,” Gabrielle Hamilton said the other day. “I am covered in scars.”

Ms. Hamilton, 45, was sitting at a kidney-shaped table in the basement beneath the dining room at Prune, the 30-seat restaurant on East First Street that she has run since 1999. She was talking about a reddish line on the left side of her face. She got it, she said, in that same year, when she was spending a weekend in Michigan.

There was a driving accident. Her car careered in the morass of a freezing fog. “I totally spun out,” she said. “And I wasn’t wearing a seat belt.” Her head smashed through the windshield and then was yanked back into the car.

“On the way back in,” she said, “I ripped open my face.”

As is clear to anyone who has met her  or anyone who has plunged into the heady rush of her memoir, “Blood, Bones & Butter,” which Random House has sent into a third printing even before its official publication this week  Ms. Hamilton is not someone who has much use for dainty conversational censorship.

Her duel with a windshield doesn’t appear in the book, but almost everything else does, it seems, whether it’s the emotional fallout from her parents’ divorce, her stomach-churning peek at the catering business, the fugue states that envelop her when her blood sugar dips, or her memory of once encountering (and disposing of) a maggot-filled rat cadaver on a stairway outside Prune.