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

Katie Porter, who is appearing Saturday with David Axelrod at the Chicago Humanities Festival, 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 head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could not explain how an annual interest rate works.

When clips of this testimony circulates, it’s often paired with violent descriptions: She rarely questions, but instead, according to Instagram and TikTok, obliterates, destroys, demolishes. Katie Porter takes no prisoners. She wrestles her witnesses to the floor. Newspapers describe her behavior as “china-shattering.” And for her part, Porter, 49, occasionally stokes all of this: As California Republican Kevin McCarthy went through 15 votes for Speaker of the House in January, there was a viral image of Porter in the chamber, in a bright orange suit, reading “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a (Expletive).”

During a break in House business last week, I spoke with Porter about whether, in a way, she’s become a performer: Does being a member of Congress require some degree of unavoidable showmanship?

She’d been asked before and replied without a pause.

“I was a professor and eighth grade teacher,” she said, “and good teachers recognize they have to engage students. If I am trying to get American people to engage in democracy, it is appropriate to think about how to do that in a way that makes it easier to understand. A lot of times, what happens in Washington is easier if everyone home is confused and can’t call you out. When I was teaching, sometimes a student gets called and doesn’t know an answer. It is easier to lecture. But these are the questions on Americans’ minds, and so you have to show you are asking.”

Yes, but how does she feel when she reads that she destroys, embarrasses, murders?

“My job is to ask questions for the American people, and it’s a witnesses’ job to be prepared and give thoughtful answers. Ultimately, the public makes those judgments, but I’m asking questions to get actual answers, not to shame. When Ben Carson (former U.S. Secretary of Housing) confused REOs (foreclosed real estate-owned properties held by banks) with Oreos, that was on him. I like to think CEOs think of how their employees struggle. If Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase) never thought of it, it’s on him.”

Politicians love to say they are not like other politicians, but it’s hard to argue that Katie Porter is like many politicians. She is a progressive Democrat with a relatively conservative foundation of voters (indeed, she was the first Democrat in her district elected to the House). Also consider her new memoir, “I Swear: Politics is Messier Than My Minivan.” It is a much rarer thing than a politician who is actually different.

It is a book by a politician — one actively soliciting votes and campaign funding, with plenty to lose — that is genuinely readable, insightful, revealing and surprisingly fun.

She believes the American people are an audience and that a politician should want their audience to be riveted. “The real work in Congress is civic education,” she writes. She also strips back the artifice and privilege of the job with everyday examples. Congress, she shows, is not conducive to someone like her: divorced, single, still raising two young kids. Which is no shock, but rarely explained so plainly. Serving in Congress favors older, wealthier politicians who don’t have children at home, requiring supervision. It works for someone who can afford two homes, one in Washington and one in their home district. She writes about colleagues who argue to reduce their own salaries — as a show of fiscal responsibility — only to be reminded that not all members of Congress are independently wealthy. “Congress is full of multimillionaires for the same reason that the NBA is full of tall people,” she writes.

If she were not a politician, she would have made a good columnist.

She writes about crying over online comments that her weight suggested a lack of self-control. She wonders if Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) ever spent time wondering if he has a pencil neck. Or if Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), before all of the reptilian caricatures, “might have liked turtles.”

Porter dredges up exactly the sort of tidbits that one imagines other government officials avoiding — menopause, underwear, a history of domestic abuse and the monthly rent on her basement apartment (but omits accusations by former staff that she’s a caustic, abusive boss, which she denies). You wonder who vetted it, and what’s left out?

“I definitely asked staffers and different kinds of people who know me in different ways about the book,” she said. “Where there was shared memory — like the opening with Stephanie Schriock (president of EMILY’s List) — I asked those people if their memories were similar. But my job as an elected official is not to play it safe. I could have written a book full of platitudes and tried-and-true politician moments, but I wanted to show there isn’t one way to be a politician, which is so often the way of an older, wealthier man.”

Early in the book, she describes her first day in Congress and getting into an elevator with other representatives and being asked where she is from. And Porter responds: “The Midwest.”

Ouch — particularly coming from someone representing a swath of California.

But she is a Midwesterner. Southern Iowa, actually. And despite the cliché, she grew up on a farm that suffered financial strains. She describes hearing her parents argue about whether to apply for free school lunch and accept government cheese. She also recalls famous politicians who blew through Iowa without a clue: George H.W. Bush joking with Iowans that, look, he was not running for agriculture secretary; Michael Dukakis telling farmers that maybe they avoid corn or soybean crops and try planting Belgian endives.

She said she “very much thinks” of herself now as a Californian. “But when I was asked (where I was from on that day in Washington) I felt overwhelmed by everything going on around me and sort of answered the way you might as a scared child — ‘And where do you live?’ ‘Um, at my house ...’ ” When she ran her first race in California, she found complacency, a district with lots of fundraising and little activism. So, remembering her state’s role as the first presidential primary of a campaign cycle, “I took to heart you should shake hands and knock on doors.” She said she never forgot living through the 1980s farm crisis “and being told you were important but once they had your vote, they never came back.”

While questioning CDC director Robert Redfield in 2020 and pushing him to commit to free COVID testing for Americans (he eventually agreed), she thought back to how the concerns of rural Midwesterners only felt important every four years: “I thought that a lot of distrust in government is not just generated by media companies, but people who need government to help, then government is not there ... So I felt this was one of those moments when people needed their government to help. And if they didn’t, why would those people still think it was worthwhile to vote or pay taxes or participate in civic life?”

Those ever-present whiteboards come out of this urge to show, not tell.

She has one that fits in her suitcase, one mounted at home for her kids and one painted across a wall in her California office. She owns whiteboard earrings. Some colleagues say it’s a gimmick, a branding exercise. She says whiteboards are relatable, handy — facts laid out in literal black and white. A few months ago she announced she will be running for the Senate seat still held by Dianne Feinstein, who is 89 and now serving her sixth term. In typical Porter fashion, she did not wait for Feinstein to announce her retirement.

Because being bold, that’s part of the brand, too.

Congresswoman Katie Porter with David Axelrod: A Live Taping of “The Axe Files,” presented in partnership with the Institute of Politics at University of Chicago, is 10 a.m. April 29 at Venue SIX10′s Feinberg Theater, 610 S. Michigan Ave.; www.chicagohumanities.org

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com