Full disclosure: I’m a huge Mindy Kaling fan. I could be her. Maybe. I mean, I want to. I wish I was.
I at least wish I was as funny as she is.
And so here is my conundrum: To tell you how much I loved this book and try to be as hilarious as Mindy is.
Basically, writing humor is hard. I try but I stink at it. So to write 240 pages of funny stuff and still get a laugh on the last page?
Sheesh. I can’t. I simply can’t because I’m not her. Mindy Kaling had me laughing from the first page to the last.
I love her. If I was 12 I’d want to be her when I grow up. Who am I kidding, I want to be her now. Her pop culture references alone are enough to make me want to hang out with her for at least a day.
(I really want to say a year but I think that sounds too much like a crazy stalker and that’s not where I’m trying to go with this.)
After her first book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me, I could not wait for the next one to come out. When it finally did, I put my name on the hold list online at the library and waited. And waited. And then finally it was available via audiobook and I jumped all over it. (I listened to the first one via audiobook as well.)
Why Not Me is an instant favorite. Mindy Kaling tackles tough topics like body size, being sexy, being different, dating, celebrity beauty myths and reality. It was eye opening and refreshing in the sense Mindy worries and thinks about the same things us non celebrity women think about. She’ s clever and witty. She’s the friend that tells you boys are gross but that they’re still fun to make out with.
Some of her essays had me wondering if she’d been in my head the way she could turn an ordinary thing into a possible story plot. The best part of Mindy Kaling’s book is that, while she was making me laugh in my car all by myself on my daily drives, or while I waited to pick up the kids, she made me think. Not horribly deep thinking, life altering thoughts but the kind of thinking that had me nodding and screaming at the air, “Preach it Mindy!” I’m pretty sure I cried a couple of times too.
Her perspective on being a celebrity and life in general reminds me that she’s just a person like everyone else. She worries about the same (strange) things we do.
Mindy makes me laugh. She makes me cry. Mindy Kaling is my spirit animal.
Go grab Why Not Me. Or better yet, get the audio book so that when you’re driving in your car all by yourself, you can pretend that Mindy’s your cool, ridiculously funny, smart, tells all, passenger too.
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