Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

By Mindy Kaling
★★★☆☆

Three Things I Liked About Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns):
1. Girl talk
2. Humor
3. Homebody Hollywood

I haven’t actively followed The Office in two or three years now (though they are all on Netflix instant, and I would love to catch up if I ever find myself with enough spare time to watch 4+ seasons), but when I did, Kelly – played by the funny and talented Mindy Kaling - was one of my favorite characters. I liked her even more when I learned that this lovable ditz was played by someone with Ivy League brains! Smart and funny is always a winning combo in my book. Anyway, so even though I don’t follow The Office anymore, when I learned that Mindy was releasing a book, I knew that I wanted to read it. I wanted to know what this oh-so-likable bundle of contradictions (smart and driven, goofy and fashion-obsessed) had to say. As it turns out: a lot. Mindy is a self-described chatterbox, and somehow, that translates to the page.

Reading Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) is like having one of those long, tangent-ridden gossip sessions with a best friend. It’s fun, witty, a little frivolous – just like a good gossip should be. It was fun to get the scoop on Hollywood from someone who worked her butt off to get there, who is neither jaded nor star struck nor affectedly humble, but simply someone happy and proud to be where she is. She hasn’t lost her excitement over things I’m sure plenty of other stars take for granted (photo-shoots, red carpets, etc.), but she’s also realistic about them, portraying both the glamorous and the not-so-glam. I gave it only three stars, though, because as fun as it was, it felt kind of like it was still in the editing process – late in the editing process, to be sure – but still at that point where the editor might say, “Hey Mindy, this draft is really good. I laughed, I snorted, I sympathized. But I think it needs a little more direction. Let’s see what we can come up with.” And then they would decide that, yeah, maybe there was a little somethin’-somethin’ they could add to make it feel a little more robust, to fill it out around the edges. I’ve got to say, though, that its slimness did suit my purposes perfectly; it was a great book to pick up and set down a little absentmindedly last week. With the impending end of the semester tugging my mind in 5 different directions at once, I had no extra mental faculties to spare for keeping complicated plot lines straight anymore.

Books Read This Year: 98
Top 100 Progress: 48/100