43 pages • 1 hour read
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
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Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “I Forget Nothing: A Sensitive Kid Looks Back”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Chubby for Life”
When Kaling was in elementary school, she noticed that she was larger than many of her classmates. Kaling’s mother was a doctor who lived in India and Africa before coming to the United States. Having seen more of the world than their daughter, her parents were unconcerned about Kaling’s weight: “She and my dad didn’t mind having a chubby daughter. Part of me wonders if it even made them feel a little prosperous” (11). Kaling compares her parents’ attitude to the American obsession with appearance. Americans have many monikers to describe various types of weight sizes, including “chubby” and “pudgy.”
When Kaling was in the 9th grade, a boy named Duante ridiculed her for her size. Kaling dieted and lost weight, but Duante continued to bully her. Kaling explains that she likes dieting but lacks discipline, so she assumes she will continue to be considered overweight for the rest of her life.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “I Am Not an Athlete”
Kaling was never athletic and did not enjoy sports as a child. While playing on the climbing ropes with her brother when she was five, she made it to the top but did not like how the rope had chafed her legs. To the embarrassment of her older brother, she was too scared to return down the rope and had to be rescued by an adult on a ladder. At Wellesley Summer Day Camp, six-year-old Kaling experienced a similar paralysis on a diving board when a lifeguard insisted that she had to jump.
She learned to ride a bike for the first time when she was 12, after her father decided she had put off learning for too long. Kaling hated riding the bike and determined to avoid doing it in the future. In college, her friends repeatedly tried to convince her to play Frisbee despite her blatant lack of ability. The collective disappointments of these experiences solidified Kaling as a non-athlete.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Don’t Peak in High School”
Kaling offers advice to young women who are interested in pursuing a career of comedy writing and acting. The road to Hollywood has two paths: 1) Become famous on YouTube and land a spot on a Disney show, or 2) Work hard in school and go to university. Kaling was a devoted student, and she argues that talking too much about the glory of high school sends a message: “It actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life” (31).
Kaling explains that the song “Jack and Diane” by John Cougar Mellencamp neither accurately describes her own experience as an American teenager nor should be held up as an ideal standard. She imagines another popular tune in which two young students of immigrant parents, who study hard, meet after school at Princeton Review and kiss politely after getting accepted into their universities of choice.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Or, How I Made My First Real Friend)
In this chapter, Kaling describes two friendships of her childhood—one with a group of girls at school who liked to shop and one with a young woman named Mavis, whom Kaling spent time with on Saturdays. Although they went to the same school, Mindy and Mavis only saw one another on the weekends to watch comedy together and practice sketches. Over time, Kaling began to withdraw from her other friend group and spent more time with Mavis. They lost touch in college, but Kaling credits her secret friend with helping her fall in love with comedy and performing.
Part 1 Analysis
In Part 1, Kaling examines her childhood and how it set her up for her career in film and television. She writes that she was a chubby child with little interest in popularity or sports. Using self-deprecating humor, Kaling paints a picture of her childhood self: Focused, academic, fearful, and observant. These early years are filled with formative experiences and habits that impact the writer throughout her life:
Because I was largely overlooked at school, I watched everyone like an observant weirdo, not unlike Eugene Levy’s character Dr. Allan Pearl in Waiting for Guffman...It has helped me so much as a writer; you have no idea. (34)
For Kaling, Pursuing a Career in Film Media begins here—by learning as much as one can and observing. She explains that many of the actors and writers she admires most were not popular in high school. Instead, they were wallflowers, overlooked and watchful of others’ activities instead of chasing their own. Kaling emphasizes the importance of studying—both schoolwork and studying people. This is The Power of Being a Nerd. By focusing on her schoolwork and taking in as much as she could about how others behaved and talked, Kaling was building her skills as a writer.
Her nerdiness carries over into her friendships. Chapter 4 uses narrative to illustrate the importance of embracing one’s interests and sharing them with others. The juxtaposition of her two friendships—Mavis and the group of girls she spent time with at school—helps to enhance this idea. After watching a Monty Python movie with Mavis multiple times on a Saturday morning, Kaling was eager to share the film’s best jokes with her other friends. However, they did not laugh and could not understand why Kaling enjoyed the film as much as she did. In this moment, Kaling learned that it was okay to be different. She began spending more time with Mavis, who helped her work on her craft as a comedian and who embraced Kaling’s authentic self.
The juxtaposition of these friendships is just one example of Kaling’s use of this literary device among many (See: Literary Devices). Juxtaposition works well in comedy writing, because it helps to exaggerate features when two concepts or characters are put side-by-side. Mavis stood in sharp contrast because of her love of comedy and lack of many of the more superficial qualities exhibited by Kaling’s friend group. This juxtaposition helps to emphasize the importance of developing meaningful and joyful relationships centered on growth.
Kaling uses juxtaposition in other ways as well. When paired with hyperbole, it further distinguishes characteristics in exaggerated ways. In Chapter 1, Kaling jokes that seeing her weight next to her classmate’s number on a scale in the teacher‘s supply closet helped her to establish an important rule: Never be closer to double the weight of someone than that person’s weight. By placing her own outward appearance next to her classmates’, she emphasizes her difference and awkwardness. Using her classmate’s weight as a foil to her own helps to establish one of many ways she felt like an outsider—something that Kaling later reveals is necessary for creativity and art. Her technique in this passage immediately introduces the theme Body Image and Self-Confidence.
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