I have a special love for Mindy Kaling. As Kelly Kapoor on NBC’s The Office she is hilariously childish and conceited. Perhaps my favorite thing about her portrayal of Kelly is that in playing the stereotype, she plays against stereotype. Kelly Kapoor was your high school’s nicest mean girl, and Kaling does this so well it’s hard to believe she isn’t exactly that in real life.
This week, Kaling’s book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and Other Concerns), was released. The book, a collection of essays and stories about friendship, celebrity, comedy and writing, gives us a glimpse to the kind of women Kaling really is: fucking hilarious and wickedly talented. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? is a very quick read. In two hours I had met the end. Admittedly I had a deadline, but fact remains. I breezed through it.
Kaling, at 32, isn’t in a place to be writing memoirs. I mean that in the nicest way. She isn’t done. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? isn’t a memoir. It isn’t full of any tangible advice, other than the kind you’d glean yourself when listening to anyone’s worst and best experiences. It is conversational. Its tone akin to the blog of your most interesting and hilarious friend, a fact Kaling herself references when listing possible alternative names for her book, “The Book That Was Never a Blog.”
For me, it was full of relativity. When Kaling talks about being chubby as a fourteen year old, it isn’t full of the humiliation and dread that talking about being chubby as an anything-year-old is usually full of. I relate to the pain of it, but also to the hilarity of it. Her stories, from making it as a writer to self-esteem shattering photo shoots (with happy endings), have this in common. It’s an honest book, revealing just the right amount of weird quirk, embarrassing underdog stories and hilarious opinion pieces to make Mindy Kaling the most likeable person living in LA right now.
Sarah McBride is an impassioned pop-culture enthusiast. Her thoughts on music, film, lit and life can be found at sarahism.com. You can follow her on twitter @sarahism.