There’s form and then there’s content.

Content without form is weak because it’s messy — think about the worst free verse, blathering on, unrhymed and undisciplined, “like playing tennis without a net,” in Robert Frost’s famous sneer.

Form without content is weak because it’s sterile—the most elegant sonnet leaves the reader cold if it serves meter and rhyme but not the heart.

David Ellis Dickerson’s memoir reveals a life troubled by an overabundance of form. It’s there that the comic tension surfaces to make this an entertaining, if at times exasperating, story of the four years of his 20s that he spent at Hallmark writing greeting cards.

Dickerson is a writer and comic, a contributor to the NPR storytelling series “This American Life.” From his youth, he also has been a constructor of crossword puzzles and other word games. He has the kind of mind that notices patterns: “MARTHA STEWART is MART plus HASTE plus WART.” He proposed to his girlfriend in a published “Casablanca”-theme puzzle whose top and bottom rows spelled out JANE BELLEVUE / PLEASE MARRY ME.

Which is to say that he has the kind of mind that is both impossibly clever and socially alienating. It’s all about the form, because after all, what would a word puzzle be without rules? Finally he discovers that this formal habit of mind distances him from others. People, he says in a number of ways, don’t get him.

“House of Cards” recounts Dickerson’s time in Kansas City at Hallmark, the world headquarters of sentiment-mongering. It might seem an idyllic place for a wordsmith with a playful sense of humor, and the author found some success there.

But he also found a profit-driven corporation run like Nixon’s White House, with paranoia about corporate espionage, inept managers, surveillance cameras everywhere, emotionally brittle creative types (one office had a designated crying room for when the stress became unbearable) and, finally, the realization that writing cards for middle America — trying to come up with sentiments that, as comedian Jim Gaffigan has said, make consumers who pick them up think, “That sounds like something I might say”—imposes its own limits on creativity. The way Dickerson tells it, it’s a miracle that anyone with a creative spark can spend a career at Hallmark and not jump out the window in despair.

The memoir gives an interesting account of the mechanics of the greeting card industry — how, for example, as a writer he would get an assignment to develop a card that could be sent to a niece on Easter, or a card for one’s priest on the 40th anniversary of his ordination.

Cards are market-researched and ranked on sales, and a historical database catalogs every Hallmark product; Dickerson tells of one writer’s huge success with the caption “Hope your birthday’s the best in the universe” because, astonishingly, no one had ever attached “birthday” to “universe” before.

But Dickerson seems almost Asperger’s-like in his inability to “read” human emotional life. He gets reprimanded continually in the Hallmark offices for talking too much, disturbing his colleagues and just generally being weirder than the corporate culture will tolerate.

The author doesn’t develop the idea fully, but he seems to blame this deficit of emotional intelligence on his fundamentalist Christian upbringing.

He says that he was raised to know the rules and to follow them. This literalism — the idea that absolutes of right and wrong, black and white, exist, and that these absolutes are where true faith is located—so stunts his emotional development that he finds himself unable to muster the empathy for all the social situations he’s writing cards for.

Running alongside his professional story is Dickerson’s struggle with romantic relationships and sexuality.

He agrees with his fiancee that they will save sex for their wedding night — and then struggles mightily with temptation, guilt and the dawning discovery that sex and love are messy, unpredictable and not so easily constrained by the facile religious rules he took for granted. When he realizes that Jane is the first woman he has ever really dated, and tries to negotiate with her an above-board plan to experience other women and their bodies, he torpedoes the engagement.

As Dickerson ends his memoir, he is traveling to Florida State University to get into a Ph. D. program in American literature.

He’s also dreaming — at age 30 — of Florida girls and keggers and all the experiences that he avoided his first time around at college, because the faith rules that he grew up with precluded it. Human experiences, in the real world where black and white give way to gray, and where sentiment runs deeper than a greeting card. He may find his way yet.

The Rev. Scott Thomas is senior minister of Amherst Community Church (United Church of Christ/Disciples of Christ) in Snyder.

House of Cards: Love, Faith and Other Social Expressions

By David Ellis Dickerson

Riverhead

369 pages, $24.95