Mindy's memoir & ancestral rabbit holes
Spent the entire day oscillating between two activities:
#1 Reading Mindy Kaling’s first memoir: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And other concerns)
I’ve been looking to witty memoirists lately as mentors of the craft. David Sedaris is currently my gold standard, so I can’t help but compare. I found Mindy’s book from an online search looking for writers similar to him.
Mindy was one of the comedy writers for ’The Office’ (which I’ve never actually watched, aside from clips) and describes the job as “sitting around chatting about hypothetical scenarios, and getting rewarded for specificity of detail.” This is exactly what she does best in her storytelling, and what makes her laugh out loud funny.
I’m not trying to be a comedy writer like her, or even a humorist like David Sedaris, but I do feel I have a wittiness in my casual conversation that’s largely lost when I write. It’s clear from reading both Mindy and David that humor is indeed in the specifics. I’d like to transcend my tendency to wax general and translate my conversational wit into my written words. I found Mindy’s example of this very aspirational.
The other thing I appreciated about her book was the variety of ways she formatted her essays. This inspired me to get creative and play with different ways to present a story.
The vibe of her book felt a little bit Hollywood insider, which I’m not mad about. As a writer, I relate more to David Sedaris’s ‘eccentric everyday person’ vibe, but as a reader, I was thoroughly entertained. One of my top categories of Google queries is celebrity details - I’m perpetually curious about the height, net worth, and romantic pasts of the rich and famous.
Although Mindy did touch on some deeper themes, I didn’t feel that something within me was being probed, like I often do when reading Sedaris. I enjoyed her stories, but I don’t relate to her life path as much as I do his. The most relatable moment for me may have been when she shared one of the alternative titles she’d considered for her book - ‘There Has Ceased to Be a Difference Between My Awake Clothes and My Asleep Clothes’.
My only Mindy “complaint” is that, on occasion, her humor felt a little too ‘try-hard’ for me. Again, David Sedaris wins here. I’m obsessed with how dry, sneaky, smart, and surprising his humor is - like he’s not trying at all to be funny, just happens to be on accident. My daughter is effortlessly hilarious like this, too, and it’s my favorite.
Overall, Mindy’s memoir was a feel-good read, great for some light-hearted laughs, and her writing has a couple of components I’d like to study more, so I’m sure I’ll be reading her two follow-up memoirs.
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#2 Diving down ancestral rabbit holes with M.
I learned of a little Russian village named Huck, which consisted mostly of German immigrants. Many of whom, at the turn of the twentieth century, traveled to the distant lands of the largely unsettled middle America, and set up shop in an obscure little podunk town. My great grandparents were among these twice-immigrant Germans, and apparently, this Germans-from-Russia-living-in-Lincoln-Nebraska community was (and is?) a whole thing. I spent 34 years there, how did I not know this? (Kind of ironic that I now live in Bali, where a large Russian community has been forming ever since the war with Ukraine began.)
I also learned that my great x13 grandfather on my mother’s side was a Puritan from England who sailed on over to America around the time of the Mayflower, had a hand in founding a few colonial towns, fathered way too many children, and likely murdered a 15-year-old servant boy (not to mention, got away with it).
Reading about this felt like being consumed by an enthralling novel that also happened to be my family history. I now have a new mission to do something sensational before my life ends, so that when my descendants are clicking through ancestry.com, they don’t see my name and skip right over it like I did with so many of my predecessors. But, instead, jump up from their research, eyes wide with historical gossip, and exclaim to the closest human either something truly heinous or fantastically heroic about me.
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