THE few times I have seen the talk show “Chelsea Lately,” a premonition of a world flattened by small talk and Kim Kardashian’s rear, my sense of its outspoken and attractive host, Chelsea Handler, has been that she is not so much giving quarter to her guests as holding them at bay with her intelligence.

It is obvious that Ms. Handler, who delights in calling her staff members “idiots,” has a good head on her shoulders. “So, I’m steering this ship,” she will say with a gloomy laugh. She has produced four books in almost as many years. She calls them silly. Silly or not, they have sold in the millions.

Below the neck, Ms. Handler is arranged along old-fashioned lines. Writers have described her as a California surfer type, but the truth is closer to the fantasy. In person, without makeup, her body has the pre-silicone lushness of a ’60s Playmate.

That naturalness also invades her writing, which is apparently how many people discover Ms. Handler. A few days before our meeting for lunch, at Lure Fishbar in SoHo, I picked up her two later books at an airport kiosk; her first, “My Horizontal Life,” an account of her one-night stands that was published in 2005, was also available, but I decided I’d start with Ms. Handler vertical and work my way backward.