Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling (Tori)

By Tori

222 Pages
Begun 02/15/2019, Finished 02/17/2019

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 51ixsUsMYiL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I tricked my husband into reading this book. I say “reading,”but I mean listening. When I described the book as an option for an audiobook on our trip to visit his parents recently, he said it didn’t sound like his kind of book. A memoir about a girl who wonders if everyone is hanging out without her and some meditations on boys and body? Yeah, I suppose the dust jacket would deter most guys. Yet as I played it on the drive as “background noise,” it didn’t take him long to put his book on Nixon away and pay attention to Mindy’s friendly tone. Of all the books I’ve read by female comedians, I think this was the best one for him to share with me. (“Bossypants” is obviously the exception. Everyone should read/listen to Bossypants. It’s untouchable in its solid first place, and even Mindy knows that.)

I think everyone who reads this book will want to be Mindy’s friend. That’s exactly what you want to say about a celebrity – right? They’re “one of us.” Though Mindy often alludes to a casually upper class way of living – like throwing away a jacket from Forever 21 in order to leave a party early or when she expresses exasperation with everyone who hasn’t bitten the bullet on Lasisk yet. The relatability comes more in what I assume anyone reading this book would have in common with her – a love of comedy, a love of Mindy, and a love of gossip. She manages to reference both Tennessee Williams and Twilight in the span of five minutes.

Some of her remarks about the future are amusingly correct, and some, like her mention of Amy Poehler’s marriage were embarrassingly off. Yet she did totally cameo in a movie with a shorter number than 11 -and an all-female Ghostbusters, both of which she mentioned wanting to see done sometime.

She has a false sense of confidence, but she’s far more aware of it than, say, Lena Dunham in her book And she’s an experienced, and intentional writer, unlike Amy Poehler. By the time she got to landing her job at The Office, I was so hooked and invested in her story, that I literally cheered while driving. I was disappointed to be at the end of our 2.5 hour trip and have to wait to hear more.
I believe she’s written another book since then, and I’m hoping to pick it up, along with checking out every other movie she’s been a part of. I feel way more into her career now. It’s not because she’s some over-comer who’s had an uphill battle in all this. There’s nothing particularly inspiring about her. I just, like most readers I think, like her.

(Click here to see what Logan thought of her.)

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling (Logan)

By Logan

222 Pages
Begun 02/15/2019, Finished 02/17/2019

I don’t normally read memoirs, and I certainly don’t usually read memoirs of actors. Delving through the personal details of the lives of people I don’t know personally isn’t exactly my cup of tea in the first place, but some obnoxious part of me finds the attention we pay to entertainers outside of their jobs very peculiar and at least a little unsettling. I don’t know why I feel this way, but this isn’t the place to try to self-psychologize. During a road trip, Tori asked if she could listen to Kaling’s 2012 memoir on audiobook while we drove a few hundred miles to visit family.

My default grumpiness about the genre was smoothed over pretty quickly by Kaling’s charming writing and conversational delivery (she narrates her own memoir for the audiobook). Mindy traces her life primarily among the contour of her trajectory towards a career in comedy. For those of you who would, like I did, break Tori’s heart by asking who Mindy Kaling is, she’s the actress who plays the Indian woman on The Office. She also wrote for the Office. She also has written an award winning play (I’ll save you the absurd details, she goes over them in the book), voice-acted in several Disney films, played Mrs. Who in a Wrinkle in Time, and finished her own comedy series for Fox in 2017.

The memoir was written while Kaling was on the cusp of full-blown importance and is a pretty good demonstration of how she got there. Her best, earliest friendship was with another girl who was, like Mindy, obsessed with comedy. The details of how that friendship formed among the fairly normal background of a highschool girl struggling with her identity and fitting in are funny and endearing.

I could write a similar paragraph for each phase of the memoir, her transition to Dartmouth where she began writing for public audiences in earnest. Her move to New York with her two best friends, where she began trying to get into show business while nannying. He first job on a TV psychic show. Getting that attention for that play I mentioned. Transitioning into writing and acting on The Office.

I don’t know a lot about Hollywood, but I suspect the story is pretty normal for people who have, “made it,” and who almost did. What makes this book stand out is the way that Kaling weaves her insights about how people work, her lists of preferences, hopes, disgusts, and everything else a person can experience in response to the world. This is where her personality and intelligence really shine through. Since these were by far my favorite parts of the memoir, it feels appropriate to finish this review with a similar list

4 Things I Liked About Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

1. Relationships

Mindy doesn’t spend much attention on dating or relationships at all. Romantic pursuits are always shoved to the far background of the story until we get to material that seems to be pretty close to the time of writing. She does devote two or three lists to dating and marriage and one rant to dissecting why guys take so long to tie our shoes, which ends up related. At the time she wrote the book, at least, Mindy wanted to be married one day. She expressed her desire to date men rather than boys, with one of the better secular explications of what that meant. She also expressed longing to see examples of good, healthy, happy marriages. As someone who wanted to be married one day, she was fed up with all of the people who talked about marriage chiefly in terms of how hard and laborious having a marriage was. I found that last part interesting precisely because Tori had expressed similar frustrations before we were married. Overall, I was struck by the ways that a human heart naturally longs for the kinds of relationships that the Holy Spirit makes possible. Humans are incurably set to seek out the good things that God designed for us, even when we aren’t seeking after the source of those gifts.

2. Seeing how television works

This isn’t exactly the kind of memoir that provides an in-depth look at some specialized field the author is acquainted with, but it isn’t not-that either. Throughout the last third of Kaling’s book we get a lot of glimpses at the creative process for television shows, how the people behind those shows interact on and off the job, and what it’s like for fans of some remarkably talented people to become their coworkers.

3. The Places

Mindy describes three distinct places she’s lived in some detail: Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she grew up, New York City, and LA. I like hearing about places I’ve never been to, especially when what I get to see is the ways that people there are more or less like the people anywhere, just with their own ways of being that way. Cambridge Massachusetts and Los Angeles are definitely in that category. NYC is special to me because that’s where Tori and I honeymooned. Beyond that, it’s always had a special allure to me as THE big city on my half of the continental United States. I could listen to anyone talk about living in New York for as long as they wanted to talk. The fact that it was a remarkably gifted writer and comedian doing the explaining was a nice bonus.

4. The Upswing

Mindy is tough, and that doesn’t get diluted in the least because her goal the entire book is to work in comedy. In fact, I’d argue it gets amplified. There are a lot of barriers between anyone who wants to work in media and the actual accomplishment of getting to do so. Even knowing that she will be successful, it’s impossible to not grit your teeth every time she reflects on a setback or hold your breath when she narrates a new opportunity. The drama may have been amplified for me because I had no idea what her career path had looked like. Still, I think for anyone, the strength of Kaling’s writing will align them with her goals and hopes and frustrations in a deeply satisfying way.

(See Tori’s thoughts on the book here.)

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

By Tori

610 pages
Begun 01/06/2019, Finished 02/03/2019

Call me a sucker. I like big books.

Reading this one has been a personal challenge for a long time. I’ve read enough of Brandon Sanderson’s novels which more than double the length of Herman Melville’s great work, so the size was not as intimidating as it was when my friends were reading it in high school. So, when I found this cheap, small copy at Half-Price Books, I decided it was time.

It would be either naïve or cocky (or both) to offer much criticism of this novel; it’s fullest depths are beyond me. I enjoyed the experience, and I’m fairly confident I’ll need to read it again in a few years to catch the layers I’m sure I missed in this first read-through.

Still – why did this take me a month to get through? Though the first and last quarters of the book are somewhat regularly paced, the middle presents the challenge. Almost half of the book is a biology lesson on whales. A friend pointed out that the chapters on cetology function much like Leviticus does to the New Testament: “Here are the details of the glories you’re about to witness.” The middle certainly prepares us for the end, but they weren’t necessarily page turners.

The book is also riddled with nuggets of poetry. Ishmael dedicates a chapter to the whale’s head, skin, forehead, oils, mating habits, color, and more, each with a couple of pages of more information than you thought you’d need. Yet in the midst of a chapter on tails, we have this gem:

Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.

The effect of spending hours knee-deep in cetology while keeping a vigilant eye out for such poetic lines left me feeling much like the men aboard the Pequod must have. After they leave Nantucket, they spend a year on the sea, never touching land again within the novel. How do they spend the weeks and months that pass between the chapters of this whale sighting or that ship passing? Much like the reader, meditating on life at sea while keeping watch for the prize.

The narrator, too, is endearing in his fanaticism. We all know someone a little too into their niche interest and a little too elevating of its superiority to all other interests. Should Perseus, St. George, and Vishnoo belong to the elite membership of whaleman as Ishmael claims in the chapter “The Honor and Glory of Whaling”? Perhaps not, but I appreciated his arguments for the case.

Also, I related to a character who could read gravestones and subsequently muse:

Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems – aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling–a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.

His character is young, perhaps my age, though we’re given little information about him. Ahab slowly enters the scene, but once he’s on deck, his looming presence overshadows all other characters so that you hardly notice the absence of Ishmael’s perspective at the end.

I joked, a month ago, that reading Moby Dick had inspired me to chase my goals, yet after I finished, the joke became real. If I can read this task of a book that has taunted me from my bucket list for years, then reading 52 books this year is far less intimidating than before.