This is my book review of Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling, her second book after Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Most of you might have recognized Mindy from her show The Mindy Project, which had a 3 season run on Fox before being canceled/saved by being picked up by Hulu.
In the show, Mindy plays a character living in New York who is a ob/gyn doctor – smart, urban, and single. She’s looking for love and getting herself into situations through her charming but strong and slightly overbearing drive to be liked and impress people. She’s found a career that suits her and that she enjoys, and is confident enough to be independent and make choices. But like most any woman, she also feels a need to over-analyze herself and the world around her and still search because she doesn’t feel like she has enough to be happy yet. Unlike any woman though, she doesn’t filter herself so that we can hear her say some of the crazy things that sometimes may come to our mind but we never voice, and she will actually act and carry through to it’s conclusion some hilarious or sarcastic interpretation taken seriously.
Now, the Mindy on the show is a character – it’s not actually Mindy Kaling’s personality. But, you can definitely feel some of the inspiration as you read her voice in the essays comprising the book. There is a chapter on the pressure to constantly look good and the funny extremes that might be taken to make that happen, a chapter on the frustration of dating a man sending mixed messages, a chapter on how she is being very reasonable on what she is looking in a man and shares her list of what she hopes for but then adds lots of qualifiers to each characteristic that started off so laid back.
On the other hand, Mindy also reveals some parts about herself that her character has never expressed. There’s a chapter devoted to how women become fast very close soulmate friends and then the drifting apart, and another chapter on the other side where you are phased out suddenly. Although there’s humor in the way she treats the subject, there are also clever observations about this reality.
There’s a chapter covering the story of the journey she experienced to get her show, and another chapter on what it is like to be her for 24 hours as she’s working. There’s commentary on the main hot tropes for TV network shows. And there’s a fun back and forth pretend correspondence telling the story of her favorite kind of romance with a Mr. Darcy type and her own version of a cross of Elizabeth Bennett and 21st century neurotic Northwest US urban woman in the setting of them being teachers at a private school.
What makes this book work is that there is heart behind the cheerful banter and jokes as well. She strikes a great balance between exaggeration and humor with sincerity and some truth, all without making it sound like she’s trying too hard. Mentions of fretting if all the hair in the shower drain means she’ll need a wig, and then where will she keep them because of all her shoes needing space are listed… Those are in the same couple pages as her worrying about forgetting the sound of her mother’s voice, whether she really has anything to say, or if she has too much to say and not enough time. As she jokes that a great thing to bring to her dinner party would be an enormous vintage diamond engagement ring that you use to propose to her, she also mentions simply ” an old picture of us you found.”
The energy in her chatty writing balances a lot of confidence with self depreciation but not too much of either. Each chapter is short and a fast read, and even if they are not laugh out loud funny, they are all entertaining.
Disclosure: This book was provided to me as part of the Blogging for Books program, but I will always provide my honest opinion and assessment of all products and experiences I may be given. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are entirely my own.
