After lunch one recent afternoon, a guy rode up on his bike and asked a friend and I, “Are you reporters? You look like reporters.” Before waiting for our response, he told us his business is reopening, his house is okay, and he used to live on Toledano, but he gave the house to his ex-wife. “She put on the weight so I gave her the house,” he said, then rode off.

I recount this story because Andrei Codrescu makes much of how whimsical and magical this city is in New Orleans, Mon Amour, a collection of his writing about his home for over 20 years now. It’s easy to read his celebration of the improbable and surreal in New Orleans and attribute it to a desire to find the city magical, but when a stranger rides up, sums up his divorce in one line and rides off, there might be something to what Codrescu’s saying.

New Orleans, Mon Amour reads the way any love letter does. Ultimately, it says more about the lover than the beloved, so your New Orleans might not be as lyrical as Codrescu’s. Or, it might be and you’re too used to city leaders standing next to your mechanic brother-in-law who dresses in drag each year on Fat Tuesday to notice. Whatever the case, Codrescu views his New Orleans the same intimate, detailed, charitable way lovers think about each others’ bodies.

He isn’t blind to the city’s dark side, and one of the most interesting essays in the collection was written in the mid-’90s shortly after 60 Minutes aired a damning story about police corruption. Whether writing about crime, cemeteries, local celebrities or people he thinks deserve notoriety, Codrescu writes as a charming, literate rogue and his writing, taken as a whole, suggests the city is his match in those ways and more. Whether the New Orleans described in New Orleans, Mon Amour is yours or not is beside the point. It’s his, and the book communicates his passion for her beautifully.