Rep. Katie Porter, rising star, transplanted Midwesterner, now memoirist, will make you squirm. Maybe you should.

Katie Porter serves a very specific, very recognizable need in our cultural imagination. Like Larry David, Beyoncé and Batman, she plays the righteous truth-teller we only become in the safety of our cars and showers, when no else one is there and our blood pressure is spiking. When she goes viral — weekly, it seems — there’s often satisfying squirm attached: A three-term House Democrat, representing Orange County, California, Porter has made her reputation from social-media snippets of congressional hearings in which she scrawls stats across a whiteboard while asking pointed, easy-to-comprehend questions of executives and government officials who are not used to being publicly challenged. She asked the CEO of JPMorgan Chase why he makes $31 million a year yet can’t explain his employees’ financial struggles. She questioned pharmaceutical CEOs why prices go up if medicines don’t improve. She revealed that a White House-appointed