This is an unexpected and unusual treat: a funny and clever collection of nonfiction stories that feels like a breath of fresh air. You could be forgiven for being unfamiliar with the name Keggie Carew if you missed her debut, Dadland: A Journey Into Uncharted Territory, about the extraordinary life story of her father as a complicated second world war hero. It was described by one literary prize judge as “the most unconventional biography I have ever read”. Either because of or in spite of that, she won the Costa biography award in 2016 and Dadland became a bestseller.

It’s hard to follow a win like that. And Carew has wisely taken a completely different direction, one more familiar for American writers of the New Yorker variety: a riot of fabulously eccentric autobiographical essays. The tone is reminiscent of David Sedaris, without ever being as cynically arch or knowing as he is, with a hint of the gloriously awkward English comedy of Nina Stibbe or Sue Townsend.

The facts of Carew’s life story are rarely stated explicitly in this collection but emerge by themselves. Carew is in her early 60s and was a visual artist for most of her life, exhibiting her work in New Zealand, Ireland and London. Overall, the writing has the presence and energy of someone who has come to writing late in life and has been burning to tell these stored-up tales for a long time. The world she evokes exudes a vibe of bohemian middle class occasionally fallen on hard times.

In the introduction, she explains that Quicksand Tales is about celebrating “human fuck-ups”: “Perfect storms, incompetence, paranoia, insecurity, clumsiness, privileged lives and overfed white middle-class anxieties, dark deeds or pure bad luck at being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She is straightforward and unpretentious. She tells you what she is going to do and then more than delivers on that promise.

What she also means is that she is one of those people that things happen to, no matter where she is (and she gets all over the place). Or, rather, she is good at remaking horrific incidents as entertaining anecdotes. In the story The Late Visitor, she recalls being a teenager in the late 1970s and travelling to Lake Tahoe in California. She can only afford to do this because she has worked for months as a forklift driver and pool hustler in Texas. (She is insistent, by the way, that all the stories are true. And I absolutely believe her.) At Lake Tahoe, she and her friend are accosted by a violent man who calls himself Animal and threatens her and her travelling companion with a knife. She builds up the tension until you almost feel sick. Then she punctures it. “I tell Animal I need to pee.” And so she escapes. The line between calamity and hilarity is always wafer-thin.

A lot of the charm of the stories lies in the detail, especially the visual detail. In The Tidy House, she is trying to retrieve three trunkfuls of stolen items from a friend’s girlfriend, including the Beatles cake decorations used on Carew’s eighth birthday cake. The way she describes them, I feel as if I owned them myself. They have “the Beatles” written on the drums and a miniature Ringo is playing them. It’s obvious from the occasional illustrations, photos and journal extracts that she is someone who documents everything and keeps everything, otherwise the level of recall in this book would be impossible.

In The Exciting Invitation, she meticulously describes a meeting with the actor Sam Neill, which happens because of a piece of art she is selling. She meets him but cannot be sure whether it really is Sam Neill and is too embarrassed and too much of a fan to ask. It’s a brilliant scene, evoking the awkwardness when you’ve passed a certain point in a social encounter and can no longer ask the question you should have asked at the beginning.

The chapter that completely blew me away was The Invisible Story, which recounts a weekend in the company of a group of around 30 actors and creatives. It turns out to be some kind of unimaginably awful workshop where everyone must arrange themselves as a “constellation” in order for the theme of a nebulous theatrical piece to emerge. Someone is appointed “The Boy”, another person is “Nature”, another is “Story”. Nothing useful emerges from any of this nonsense. And yet everyone except for Carew behaves as if they have experienced some kind of spiritual awakening. She captures the horror and the absurdity of it perfectly.

Don’t be put off by the slightly unwieldy title of this book. This is laugh-out-loud, delightful comedic writing. It captures a mood of escapism and nostalgia that I found incredibly reassuring and cheering. More Keggie, please.

• Quicksand Tales: The Misadventures of Keggie Carew is published by Canongate (£16.99). To order a copy for £11.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99