Book Review Part Deux: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Yesterday I promised to review my two favorite books that I read in 2013.  The second book that I really loved this year is Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?:

This was one of my favorite books of 2013 for multiple reasons.  First and foremost, it made me laugh out loud.  Intellectually, I know that Mindy Kaling must be extremely talented and funny based on her career trajectory.  At the same time, I conflate her ditzy television characters with Mindy the television writer.  Bad Bettina.  You should know better than that.  The book is genuinely funny and interspersed with surprising insight on relationships, friendships, her own flaws, etc.

I also liked this book because there are two kinds of stories I always love to hear:  "How did you meet?" stories from married couples who've been together for ages, and "How did you become successful in Hollywood?" stories.  The latter always intrigues me because rarely is anyone ever "discovered" or given that magical mentor who drops the person into the dream job.  What I often here are stories of hard work, minor successes and failures, combined with luck and coincidence and eventually success.  In such a competitive, unpredictable field, it's comforting to know there isn't one prescribed path to get to that bit of "success".  It's also nice to know concrete examples of failures even when you know logically everyone fails.  =)

Finally, the stories in this book touch on some of Kaling's experiences as a first generation Indian American.  Most of her television writing rarely touches on the fact that she's an Indian American.  In a lot of ways, Kaling is doing for Indian Americans what Bill Cosby did for African Americans--that is creating characters that are primarily human beings who HAPPEN to be Indian (or in Bill Cosby's case, African American).  I watched The Mindy Project's PaleyFest panel, and felt seriously annoyed when an Indian woman asked Kaling how being Indian affected her writing (or something to that vein).  It seemed to me that Kaling struggled with the question and sort of pointed to the Diwali episode of The Office, but ultimately responded by saying that her being Indian wasn't the point of the show.  Ultimately I felt like the woman who asked the question failed to understand that the role of Indians in the public consciousness of America was evolving from the hilariously ignorant and unintentionally funny immigrant to being a multi-dimensional person not solely defined by their ethnic heritage.  All of that being said however, every ethnic group that goes through being the first generation in America goes through their own unique set of experiences.  Reading Kaling's experiences and seeing the parallels in my own experiences lent this book a very special charm.  However, even in this autobiographical book, once again the "Indian" experiences are limited and Kaling's talents as a writer for the mainstream really shines.