We heart Mindy Kaling. In fact, she’s a member of my imaginary girl gang, and someone that I would definitely invite to a dinner party. I read her first book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (And Other Concerns) and found myself laughing out loud chapter after chapter. When I heard she was writing a follow up book, my expectations were high, especially as I have since read equally as funny books from Tina and Amy. I’m happy to say, that Why Not Me?, Kaling’s most recent book, delivered on all points.
I read the entire book on a plane from New York to Dallas last week (I’m a very quick reader), and was laughing out loud so frequently that I was soliciting strange looks from my row-mates. The book, similar to her last, is a serious of essays where she shares insightful and personal stories from her life.
I took particular note of the chapter “Things to Bring to my Dinner Party”, since after reading her book I feel like we are besties and we’ll be inviting each other to dinner parties all the time now. I enjoyed the behind the scenes look at how The Mindy Project came about, and how she felt about it being cancelled by Fox and picked up by Hulu. In that chapter, she mentioned she was on her first vacation in seven years when she got the call about the show, and after reading her essay titled “A Day in the Life of Mindy Kaling”, I have to say that girl deserves so many more vacations because she is incredibly hard working.
My favorite section of the book was where she discussed her relationships. In “Soup Snakes” she speaks candidly about her relationship with best friend B.J. Novack stating “I will freely admit: my relationship with B.J. is weird as hell.” In “One of the President’s Men” she describes a relationship she had with, well, one of the president’s men. But perhaps my favorite essay on this topic was “A Perfect Courtship in my Alternate Life”, where Kaling imagines her life had she not moved to Hollywood through a series of e-mails that could be a book on their own right.
The only essay I didn’t particularly care for was the transcript of her speech for Harvard Law School in early 2014. Perhaps I might have enjoyed it better had she shared tidbits of her process for writing the speech, and her feelings on giving it, rather than just giving the reader the transcript of a speech that can easily be found on YouTube. It sort of felt like the publisher thought she was short some pages and they were like, “I know, let’s just throw a copy of your Harvard speech in there”.
All in all though, Kaling’s most recent book is a quick and easy read, and is delightfully funny. Go pick up a copy today and read it this weekend!
-Ashley xx