In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), actress, writer and comedian Mindy Kaling writes a hilarious and smart series of anecdotes, jokes, and advice tidbits.
Kaling describes obstacles she encountered and overcame on her road to success, all the while maintaining that Kathy Griffin “D-list” outlook.
Recalling her time as a guest writer on Saturday Night Live, and how she was starstruck by some of the big names she was working with—Seth Meyers, Amy Poehler, and Tina Fey — Kaling writes, “While they all talked and goofed around, I sat at the table listening and smiling and saying nothing, like an upbeat foreign exchange student who spoke very little English.”
Fans of The Office will definitely hear that girly and hilarious voice of Kaling’s character, Kelly Kapoor, come through in this book.
Kaling takes us behind the scenes of the show and onto the unglamorous set, describing the street they film on as “a favored drag-racing strip for competitive, bored Mexican teenagers.” She tells us what it’s like to work with Steve Carell, a guy who seems so nice that he might be disguising the fact that he’s “secretly Perez Hilton.”
And hearing the modest and unashamed celebrity describe a time when she, Jenna Fisher, and Angela Kinsey (Pam and Angela on The Office) overestimated their fame at the start of season two and were turned away at the door of an A-list party was both refreshing and hilarious. “We stood and watched the One Tree Hill cast waltz in with no problem. The PR people at the party regarded us with the disdain normally reserved for on-set tutors for child actors.”
While Kaling shares countless lessons learned from experience, it is clear she doesn’t take life too seriously. In a chapter titled “Don’t Peak in High School,” she provides words of wisdom to teens whose high school careers don’t live up to 90210 or the song “Jack & Diane,” about “two popular, idle, all-American white kids having a blast.” She presents her own, better, idea of what she wishes kids would listen to. “I wish there was a song called ‘Nguyen & Ari,’ a little ditty about a hardworking Vietnamese girl who helps her parents with the franchised Holiday Inn they run, and does homework in the lobby, and Ari, a hardworking Jewish boy who does volunteer work at his grandmother’s old-age home, and they meet after school at a Princeton Review.” Kaling credits much of her writing abilities to these high school days as an unpopular “observant weirdo” who studied the class clown, and then turned her observations into comedy later on.
Confident in her “nebulous ‘normal American woman’ size,” Kaling shares some of the struggles she’s endured, as stylists don’t know how to dress her body type. She tells a story of when People named her one of the Most Beautiful English-Speaking Persons in North America. All the gowns that were brought for her to wear at the photo shoot were size zeros, except for one shapeless dress. After a waterworks breakdown in the bathroom, she regained her confidence, and the gown of her choice was cut down the back, producing a glamorous photo from the front, and a hidden, pinned-up back. Kaling is confident and wants that to come across in the book. But she is also not afraid to show her real side—that moment when her insecurity takes over and she cries because the dress won’t fit. We just can’t hate her for being one of People’s Most Beautiful.
Compared to Tina Fey’s Bossypants, this is a similar book that combines the stories and thoughts of the author, but is not quite a memoir. While both were witty and clever throughout, I found myself laughing out loud more in Bossypants. The middle few chapters of Kaling’s book moved a little too slowly, as some of the jokes seemed a bit misplaced and went on for too long. The chapter, “Types of Women in Romantic Comedies Who Are Not Real,” while funny, seemed to be missing something, as the rest of the book combined humor with Kaling’s life experiences. The joke may have been a funny paragraph somewhere, but a whole chapter seemed excessive.
On the whole, however, the book was enjoyable and there is something for everyone. Kaling provides unique and thoughtful opinions and advice on high school, college, work, love, health, and more, all interspersed with laughs along the way. I recommend it to anyone looking for a quick and funny read, and certainly for any fan of The Office or The Mindy Project.
