I haven’t watched The Office<\/i> or The Mindy Project<\/i>, 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\u2014there 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<\/i>, is twenty pages). Some of the shorter pieces fell flat for me, but even not having watched The Office<\/i>, 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). <\/p>\n
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>, 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<\/i> 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:<\/p>\n 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<\/i> anxiety. They are distinct and unnerving anxieties. The questions that ran through my mind went something like this:<\/p>\n 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!<\/i> (66)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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<\/i>, a line said by Colin Firth’s character in Bridget Jones’s Diary<\/i>, and the music from A Charlie Brown Christmas<\/i>, among other things).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10095\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}