Why Not Me?

About the book

Mindy Kaling has found herself at a turning point. So in Why Not Me?, she shares her ongoing journey to find fulfilment and adventure in her adult life, be it falling in love at work, seeking new friendships in unlikely places, or attempting to be the first person in history to lose weight without any behaviour modification whatsoever. In "How to Look Spectacular", she reveals her tongue-in-cheek solutions for guaranteed on-camera beauty. "Player" tells the story of Mindy being seduced, then dumped, by a female friend in LA. And in "Soup Snakes," she spills some secrets on her relationship with ex-boyfriend and close friend B. J. Novak. Mindy has put the anxieties, the glamour and the celebrations of her second coming-of-age into this book, to which anyone can relate. (And, if they can't, they can skip to the parts where she talks about meeting Bradley Cooper.)

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Mindy Kaling Biography

Vera Mindy Chokalingam (born June 24, 1979), known professionally as Mindy Kaling (), is an American actress and producer. She first gained recognition starring as Kelly Kapoor in the NBC sitcom The Office (2005–2013), for which she also served as a writer, executive producer, and director. For her work on the series, she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series and five times for Outstanding Comedy Series. Kaling gained wider attention for creating, producing and starring in the Fox comedy series The Mindy Project (2012–2017). She created the NBC sitcom Champions (2018), also appearing in five episodes, the Hulu miniseries Four Weddings and a Funeral (2019), the Netflix comedy-drama series Never Have I Ever (2020–present), and the HBO Max comedy-drama series The Sex Lives of College Girls (2021–present).Kaling's film career includes voiceover work in Despicable Me (2010), Wreck-It Ralph (2012), and Inside Out (2015). She had roles in comedy films, such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), No Strings Attached (2011), The Five-Year Engagement (2012), The Night Before (2015), A Wrinkle in Time and Ocean's 8 (both 2018), and Late Night (2019), the last of which she also wrote and produced. Her memoirs, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (2011) and Why Not Me? (2015), reached The New York Times Best Seller list. She also received a Tony Award for Best Musical as a producer for the musical A Strange Loop.

Early life

Vera Mindy Chokalingam was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to father Avudaiappan Chokalingam, an architect, and mother Swati Chokalingam (née Roysircar), an obstetrician/gynecologist (OB/GYN). She has an elder brother, Vijay. Kaling’s parents are from India and met while working at the same hospital in Nigeria. Her father, a Tamilian raised in Chennai (Madras), was overseeing the building of a wing of the hospital. Her mother, a Bengali from Mumbai (Bombay), was working as an OB/GYN. The family immigrated to the United States in 1979, the same year Kaling was born. Kaling's mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2012.Kaling has said she has never been called Vera, her first name, but has been referred to as Mindy since her mother was pregnant with her while her parents were living in Bengal. They were already planning to move to the United States and wanted, Kaling said, a "cute American name" for their daughter, and liked the name Mindy from the TV show Mork & Mindy. The name Vera is, according to Kaling, the name of the "incarnation of a Hindu goddess." Kaling graduated from Buckingham Browne & Nichols, a private school in Cambridge, in 1997. The following year, she entered Dartmouth College, where she was a member of the improvisational comedy troupe The Dog Day Players and the a cappella group The Rockapellas, was the creator of the comic strip Badly Drawn Girl in The Dartmouth (the college's daily newspaper), and was a writer for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern (the ... Read full biography