I love Mindy Kaling. Just getting it out in the open right off the bat. Major girl crush over here. When reading a biography(which I don’t do very often, as you can probably tell from this blog), I have to have either a keen interest in the life being written about (like when I read hundreds of histories of the European royal families in middle school) or a feeling that you’d love to be best friends with the person you’re reading about. Because this book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), is sort of an autobiography, sort of a collection of humor essays, and sort of a lifestyle guide, I wouldn’t have liked it nearly as much if I didn’t care about Kaling anyway. However, since I’ve loved her all the way back since the second season of The Office, I definitely was already buying what she’s selling. The claws below are mine.
Kaling does many things well in this book. First, she makes herself extremely accessible to her audience, which is primarily quirky(ish) young(ish) women. She relates her misadventures and mistakes as a way to establish commonality with the reader and invest the reader in her from the start. Second, Kaling is smart. Each story or essay in the novel is exactly as long as it needs to be to maximize both humor and the plot of each episode itself. Her intelligence also elevates the humor she specializes in as a storyteller. Though pop culture references appear on almost every page, so do references to literature and history. Kaling has a Dartmouth degree, so this shouldn’t be surprising. Finally, she blends self-deprecation and confidence in a way that made me simultaneously respect her and feel that she was a “real girl.” She talks candidly about both her successes and her failures, from the time she stormed out of her job for a petty reason to when she co-wrote a critically acclaimed play.
Ultimately the sign of a great autobiography or work of nonfiction is that, despite having just read pages and pages about a person or topic, you want to know more once you finish the book. That was definitely the case here. I like Kaling much more than I already did after finishing her book and learning about her past— what’s more, I also respect her in ways I didn’t expect. So I’ll keep watching her shows and following her twitter account, because Mindy Kaling is totally awesome (and so is this book).