“Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?”, Mindy Kaling
Published November 1, 2011
Mindy Kaling has lived many lives: the obedient child of immigrant professionals, a timid chubster afraid of her own bike, a Ben Affleck - impersonating Off-Broadway performer and playwright, and, finally, a comedy writer and actress prone to starting fights with her friends and coworkers with the sentence “Can I just say one last thing about this, and then I swear I'll shut up about it?”
Perhaps you want to know what Mindy thinks makes a great best friend (someone who will fill your prescription in the middle of the night), or what makes a great guy (one who is aware of all elderly people in any room at any time and acts accordingly), or what is the perfect amount of fame (so famous you can never get convicted of murder in a court of law), or how to maintain a trim figure (you will not find that information in these pages). If so, you've come to the right book, mostly!
In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Mindy invites readers on a tour of her life and her unscientific observations on romance, friendship, and Hollywood, with several conveniently placed stopping points for you to run errands and make phone calls. Mindy Kaling really is just a Girl Next Door - not so much literally anywhere in the continental United States, but definitely if you live in India or Sri Lanka.
“But make no mistake about it—it’s precisely people who are convinced they could actually put these self-serving scenarios into practice who, when push comes to shove, aren’t able to do a thing.”
Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? is one of those memoir-ish books that feels less like reading a celebrity’s life story and more like hanging out with your witty, chaos goblin best friend who also happens to be wildly successful. I’d been following Mindy since her blog days, back when she wrote Things I Bought That I Love—exactly as charming and hilarious as it sounds and very much peak Tumblr. This book felt like an extension of that approachable, funny voice I already adored.
What really makes this book stand out is Mindy’s comedic timing. You can hear her voice in every line—the same voice that shaped some of the sharpest, funniest episodes of The Office. She’s self-deprecating but never self-pitying, irreverent but still heartfelt, and effortlessly relatable even when she’s talking about things most of us will never experience (like Hollywood writers’ rooms). The essays range from awkward childhood stories to musings on friendship, body image, and ambition, and somehow it all feels cohesive, like flipping through a scrapbook annotated by your funniest bff.
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? is proof that memoirs don’t need to be grand or dramatic to be entertaining. They just need to be honest, funny, and a little bit vulnerable. It’s a book I keep coming back to whenever I need a laugh or a reminder that even successful, wildly talented women once worried about whether people were hanging out without them.
Content Warnings
Note: This is not an exhaustive list of content and trigger warnings.
fatphobia
Goodreads | Storygraph | Bookshop (support your local bookstore)
Owned: Audible; hardcover