Deeper insights lost amid whipped cream humour
TEN years ago, I interviewed Mindy Kaling when she happened to be working on her first essay collection, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns).
Her essays, she said, would be deliberately breezy. At the time, Kaling was best known for playing boy-crazy Kelly Kapoor on NBC’s The Office (for which she was also a prolific writer), so she was already associated with flippant quips. Anyone who picked up Everyone – a bestseller – hoping to know more about her would, yes, learn about Kaling’s first-generation Indian American upbringing, her comedy-writer aspirations and big break on The Office. But they would also ingest a solid helping of frothy listicles about “Best Friend Rights and Responsibilities” and “Franchises I Would Like to Reboot”. Kaling leaned into her alter ego – conceding people “assume I am Kelly Kapoor” anyway – by including a list of “Things Kelly and I Would Both Do”. Mostly, she kept the book light, as promised.
“If I had all these vices, like an addiction to plastic surgery, and I slept around,” she told me at the time, “then every year I would come out with a bestseller. But that’s not why people are interested in me.”
People are very interested in Kaling, and not for her vices. She has kicked through meaningful doors as the first Indian American to create and star in her own TV show (The Mindy Project). She found success channelling her “otherness” into mainstream art, like Late Night, the film she wrote about being a woman on a mostly white male writing staff, and Never Have I Ever, the Netflix hit she created about a suburban teen trying to reconcile her Indian and American identities.
So if her tendency in writing personal essays is to be more slapdash or exploratory of her Kapoor-ish qualities – Kaling, like Kapoor, is a celebrity junkie and rom-com fiend, after all – then, sure.
Fluff is good! Fluff is keeping us all going.
And yet, with her third essay collection, ,” I wanted more. Seven years removed from her run as Kapoor, having achieved leverageable power in Hollywood while also navigating single motherhood (daughter Katherine was born in 2017), Kaling’s life has fleshed out in ways
