One Nightstand With Mindy Kaling

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at The Blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

“One of my best qualities about reading is that I am not a snob and I really like so many different genres,” says Mindy Kaling, actor, comedian, screenwriter, producer — and, now, book publisher. Since 2022, Kaling has been selecting books for Mindy’s Book Studio, a collaboration between Amazon Publishing and Amazon Studios. “Amazon came to me and said, ‘Hey, would you be interested in doing an imprint?’” she says. “‘You can pick all of the authors yourself and meet them and they can all be women of color and women from the sorts of backgrounds that you think are fascinating or underrepresented.’”

These days, Kaling is drawn to women writing about romance or murder (“page turners,” she says), but her love for reading was born during childhood. “It’s this kind of typical child-of-immigrant story, growing up in the ’80s and ’90s in suburban Boston. We didn’t have nannies or babysitters, but both my parents worked and so different other things sort of became nannies for us,” she says. “I’d go to my mom’s OB-GYN office, and she would just put me a room, and I could just bring a book or I could stare at the wall.”

Romance figures heavily in four of Kaling’s favorite books, which focus not only on falling in love, but working out finding the right partner in a complicated world. “I know on a certain level, as a writer who writes stories for women, that finding someone who is good and has a good heart and is earnest is what one should yearn for, and you should outgrow these immature tendencies to find someone funny and mean,” she says. “I’ve literally written this story for young women and I haven’t learned that lesson myself.”

Still, that doesn’t matter for Kaling, who is content where she is. “I don’t go on the apps,” she says. “Once, pretty recently, Reese Witherspoon wanted to set me up with somebody and I didn’t even look to see who it was. I didn’t laugh in her face because I love her and I love that she was thinking of me in that way, but I just thought, ‘It’s not time.’ But I laughed at the idea of doing my hair and putting on makeup and getting out there. I have three kids under the age of 7, so for me to want to leave them, especially when I travel for work a lot, just...” She shrugs. “I’m very happy. I work with so many men and I love romance, but it’s interesting how all those things can be true and you can decide that you’re like, ‘I’m fine.’”

Discover the rest of Kaling’s favorite books below.

Her first selection, Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey, tells the story of a young Canadian woman going through a divorce. “Monica Heisey wrote on Schitt’s Creek,” Kaling says. “I don’t know her, but she’s a comedy writer and whenever comedy writers write fiction, I’m always so jealous and excited about it.”

“I’ve seen a lot of stories about women around my age getting divorced, but I haven’t really seen the young divorced woman story, and so I was really drawn to that,” she adds. “Going into it, I would have this feeling of if you get divorced in your 20s, I’m like, ‘Did it even happen? You’re fine.’ I don’t think anyone should be getting married until they’re 35 anyway. But I went into it thinking, ‘Are these even real problems?’ And then thinking like, ‘Oh, this book is so funny and so real.’ And a lot of books and TV shows and movies are written about women who are messes and their lives are falling apart, but I think the observations in this were particularly good.”

Her second choice, Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, tells the story of a young writer on an SNL-like Saturday night comedy sketch show who falls in the love with the impossibly handsome male guest. “I’ve read Prep and American Wife and I just love her,” says Kaling, who’s met the author a couple of times. “I love her personally, too.”

She made a beeline to buy the novel due to the subject material. “Nobody writes about comedy writers and working at SNL, which is such a mysterious and interesting world for someone like me, who lives in LA and writes for sitcoms and it feels so glamorous,” she adds. “But it was deceptive because it’s actually very hard to read because I just related so much.”

Coincidentally, Kaling was offered a job writing on SNL:

I was writing and acting on The Office and it was Season 2, and I got a call to come and audition. I’m not like Bill Hader and Jimmy Fallon with all my impressions, so I went there and I had an impression of Ben Affleck and not much else because, I don’t know, I was 24 or 25 and an Indian woman — there’s not a lot of people who I could do impressions of believably. It was Seth Meyers and Lorne Michaels in the room — it was just a very empty room. And when I left, they wanted to hire me as a writer and not as an actor. I remember they were like, “Well, people like Jason Sudeikis, they started as writers, and then they became actors.” But then my boss at The Office, Greg Daniels, was like, “Well, I said I’d let you out of your contract if you were a cast member on the show, but if you’re going to be a writer on that show, you’re a writer and a performer on this show, so I think you should stay.” I think that was ultimately the best decision. But that was my brush with SNL. It was really a glamorous thing, though, to go and audition and have to do that in front of Lorne and Seth and everything.

Her third book, Yours For the Season by Uzma Jalaluddin, is published under Kaling’s imprint. “Uzma loves romantic comedies, and she has made it her life’s mission to write romantic comedies about South Asian characters, Muslim characters, and put them in traditional romantic story storylines, which I think is amazing,” she says. “We have another book with her, which we’re adapting into a movie, and if you talk to her as a writer, she is obsessed with Sleepless in Seattle. She loves You’ve Got Mail and she has these sorts of delightfully mainstream sources of inspiration.”

Kaling adds that Jalaluddin brings a specific cultural depth to her work. “She always talks about the individuality versus loyalty to your family and familial expectation, and I think that if you’re an immigrant from any culture, that will really resonate with you,” she says, noting that she also appreciates the author’s guileless characters. “People are straightforward in her books. It’s not that they’re not sarcastic and passionate and disagree, but I think her worldview is really reflected in her books, which is that people are sort of inherently good and just kind of misunderstood.”

A personal connection sparked Kaling’s interest in her final selection, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. “My parents met in Lagos, Nigeria, and it’s always been a very mysterious place to me because they met there and then they got married there, and then they moved to the United States,” she says. “And even though they’ve had some of their formative experiences there and they both spent seven to eight years [there], they have never brought us back. And so whenever I can read stories about Lagos and everything, I find it fascinating.”

The book also satisfied Kaling’s love for good comedy writing. “The younger sister is so funny, and the writing is incredibly deadpan, very unusual,” she says. “And again, I love murder, so I am obsessed with sisterhood and murder and it’s funny, but in a very different way than the other books are.”

Watch the full interview below.