I haven’t watched The Office or The Mindy Project, and I don’t read many celebrity memoirs in general, but I found a copy of this book somewhere at some point (a Little Free Library? a giveaway pile at work? I don’t even remember) and thought it might be a good fun/light read. Which it was, although I’m probably not its ideal audience—there were a lot of pop culture references I didn’t get without Googling them. The thirty-seven pieces in the book are arranged somewhat chronologically, somewhat thematically, and range in length from very short (e.g. a one-page piece whose title is “Why Do Men Put On Their Shoes So Slowly?”) to somewhat longer (the longest piece, about The Office, is twenty pages). Some of the shorter pieces fell flat for me, but even not having watched The Office, I liked the section about it a whole lot (and even paused in my reading of that section to watch the pilot episode, which I liked: I’ll probably catch up on more of the show at some point).
In general, I found the pieces about Kaling’s working life to be the strongest: it felt like she had interesting things to say about being a writer/working in Hollywood/how she got to where she was when she was writing this book, and those pieces tended to be a little longer, which I liked: it felt like there was more room in them for humor and good writing and good narrative flow. In addition to the piece about The Office, I really liked “Failing at Everything in the Greatest City on Earth,” “Day Jobs,” and “Matt & Ben & Mindy & Brenda,” all of which are about Kaling’s pre-Office work/artistic life, and which are also full of really great details about life in NYC in the early 2000s. Kaling is a few years older than me, but I’m close enough to her age that passages like this felt pretty relatable, even though my NYC experience at this time was that of a college student rather than a college grad:
It was October 2001 and I lived in New York City. I was twenty-two. I, like many of my female friends, suffered from a strange combination of post-9/11 anxiety and height-of-Sex-and-the-City anxiety. They are distinct and unnerving anxieties. The questions that ran through my mind went something like this:
Should I keep a gas mask in my kitchen? Am I supposed to be able to afford Manolo Blahnik shoes? What is Barneys New York? You’re trying to tell me a place called “Barneys” is fancy? Where are the fabulous gay friends I was promised? Gay guys hate me! Is this anthrax or powdered sugar? Help! Help! (66)
Other highlights for me included the title piece (which is about growing apart from childhood friends in high school/bonding with a new friend about shared interests) and a list piece called “Non-Traumatic Things That Have Made Me Cry” (which includes Paul Simon’s Graceland, a line said by Colin Firth’s character in Bridget Jones’s Diary, and the music from A Charlie Brown Christmas, among other things).
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