Deeper insights lost amid whipped cream humour

Mindy Kaling’s new essays are lightweight entertainment for trying times

TEN years ago, I interviewed Mindy Kaling when she happened to be working on her first essay collection, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns).

Her essays, she said, would be deliberately breezy. At the time, Kaling was best known for playing boy-crazy Kelly Kapoor on NBC’S

The Office (for which she was also a prolific writer), so she was already associated with flippant quips. Anyone who picked up Everyone – a bestseller – hoping to know more about her would, yes, learn about Kaling’s first-generation Indian American upbringing, her comedy-writer aspirations and big break on The Office. But they would also ingest a solid helping of frothy listicles about “Best

Friend Rights and Responsibilities” and “Franchises I Would Like to Reboot”. Kaling leaned into her alter ego – conceding people “assume

I am Kelly Kapoor” anyway – by including a list of “Things Kelly and I Would Both Do”. Mostly, she kept the book light, as promised.

“If I had all these vices, like an addiction to plastic surgery, and I slept around,” she told me at the time, “then every year I would come out with a bestseller. But that’s not why people are interested in me.”

People are very interested in Kaling, and not for her vices. She has kicked through meaningful doors as the first Indian American to create and star in her own TV show (The Mindy Project). She found success channelling her “otherness” into mainstream art, like Late Night, the film she wrote about being a woman on a mostly white male writing staff, and Never Have I Ever, the Netflix hit she created about a suburban teen trying to reconcile her Indian and American identities.

So if her tendency in writing personal essays is to be more slapdash or exploratory of her Kapoor-ish qualities – Kaling, like Kapoor, is a celebrity junkie and rom-com fiend, after all – then, sure.

Fluff is good! Fluff is keeping us all going.

And yet, with her third essay collection, Nothing Like I Imagined (Except for Sometimes),” I wanted more. Seven years removed from her run as Kapoor, having achieved leverageable power in Hollywood while also navigating single motherhood (daughter Katherine was born in 2017), Kaling’s life has fleshed out in ways that make her essays feel frustratingly inconsequential.

A story about her first days in Los Angeles sets up a character-building journey in which a crushingly lonely Kaling tries to make friends but then skips to the part where she ditches her starter squad for being toohealthy eaters who drink tea instead of Bellinis. When she teases a telling detail that might reveal something about the friends who fell short, and also about herself, she doesn’t elaborate. She ghosts the group, and kind of ghosts the reader, too.

Rather than investigate her choice to raise her daughter as a single woman, Kaling ticks off a list of “Times I Wish I Had a Husband” (“When I Need to Reach Things”) and “Times I’m Happy I Don’t Have a Husband” (“When I Remember Both Nightstands Are Mine”).

For a self-professed romantic who helped craft the achingly nuanced courtship between The Office’s Jim and Pam – and earned an Emmy nomination for co-writing “Niagara”, the tender episode where they get married – Kaling’s view of modern partnership feels far less considered. “After he puts a ring on it,” she muses in a bit about driving, “you always end up riding in the passenger seat.”

Is Kaling being glib for the punchline or sincere? Probably the former. In any case, it seems fitting that she’s currently co-writing the script for Legally Blonde 3: Like Elle Woods, Kaling’s unseriousness belies a capacity to outsmart everyone in the room. I admire this duality; I only hoped to glimpse more of her behind-the-scenes thoughtfulness, rather than the dogged levity that defines her public persona.

Sometimes, Kaling does dig deep, but the impact tends to get lost in the midst of so much filler. Reading Imagined in a decidedly unbreezy time is like eating just the whipped cream off a brownie sundae. As long as you’re devouring empty calories – from a world-class pastry chef – a little chew would be nice. | The Washington Post