It might look like I really enjoy celebrity memoirs but that's only because they're easy to listen to when I'm out walking my dog: I don't need to keep characters straight, my mind can drift or I can trade pleasantries with a neighbour without missing much, and for the most part, celebrities are pretty good at reading their own writing. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me was an impulsive choice for me (I like Mindy Kaling but wasn't burning with curiosity about her), but overall, it was interesting and entertaining. If I had a complaint, though, it's that it came too soon: Written in 2011, before The Mindy Project, Kaling didn't really have enough biographical material to fill a memoir (yet) and the lists and essays that she pads this book with were much less interesting than her story.
And now that I have a few similar memoirs under my belt, I can say that Kaling's path to success was much easier than Tina Fey's or Amy Poehler's: after graduating with a degree in Playwriting from Dartmouth, Kaling moved with her best friend to New York, worked a couple of uninspiring jobs for a few years, expanded a skit into an award-winning Fringe play, moved it Off Broadway, moved it to Los Angeles, and with the help of an aggressive agent, was offered first a pilot and, when that didn't work out, a job writing for the first season of The Office. All this by the time she was 24. Obviously, Kaling wouldn't have succeeded at all without talent but she sure made it sound easy (and for everyone who thinks she isn't that funny, Kaling was the one who wrote the Office episode about Michael Scott burning his foot on his George Foreman Grill/alarm clock -- that's one of my favourite episodes anyway).
With the audiobook, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? is like have a one-sided conversation with Kaling, and it made me wonder if I would want to be her friend: on the one hand, I agree with her about the meanness and unwatchability of the modern Comedy Central Celebrity Roasts and the basic sadness of the hooking-up culture, but on the other hand, I'd have no interest in her opinions about New York Fashion Week or the latest Shopaholic book; she seems an interesting mix of thoughtful and shallow. And if I was her friend, I would advise Kaling not to put too many references to real people in a midlife memoir: it was uncomfortable listening to her admiration of Amy Poehler's and Will Arnett's (now defunct) marriage and even more uncomfortable listening to her taking a playful swipe at the Fashion Police "led by the reanimated corpse of Joan Rivers". As for prescience:
I always wanted the reboot of Ghostbusters to be four girl-ghostbusters. Like, four normal, plucky women living in New York City searching for Mr. Right and trying to find jobs -- but who also bust ghosts. I'm not an idiot, though. I know the demographic for Ghostbusters is teenage boys, and I know they would kill themselves if two ghostbusters had a makeover at Sephora.When it was announced that Ghostbusters is going to be rebooted with female leads, the comments section of my newspaper went nuts: and it wasn't teenaged guys who saw the announcement as an apocalypse on the scale of marauding Stay-Puft Marshmallow men.
In the end, I found Mindy Kaling to be bright, relatable, and entertaining, and her book to be interesting when personal…but a little dull when listing "Non-Traumatic Things That Have Made Me Cry" or "Best Friend Rights and Responsibilities". This was a fine book for dog walking, and at under five hours, Kaling didn't overstay her welcome. I'll end on the kind of observation that I liked in this book:
I don’t think it should be socially acceptable for people to say they are “bad with names.” No one is bad with names. That is not a real thing. Not knowing people’s names isn’t a neurological condition; it’s a choice. You choose not to make learning people’s names a priority. It’s like saying, “Hey, a disclaimer about me: I’m rude."
