Reading Mindy Kaling’s new book feels a lot like sitting down and talking to your best friend or rather, by the time you’re done, you wish Kaling was your best friend. She’s less neurotic than the character she plays on The Mindy Project but just as funny, and she’s wonderfully honest and self-deprecating. Want to know how to look like a Hollywood starlet? She recommends hiring a team of highly paid hair and makeup people, plus a lighting guy to follow you around all day so the shadows that hit your face are flattering. I could call this book refreshing, but I won’t because that makes it sound like a douche or sports drink commercial. That said, it’s a very quick read and not particularly substantial.

The first thing Kaling addresses is the absurd standard of beauty women are held to. She goes into detail about how much actual work is involved in making her “TV ready.” Apparently a lot of hair is required:

The first thing you need to know is that the hair on your head is worthless. The color, the length, the thickness, everything. You will never see anyone on TV sporting their own God-given hair, unless it’s on, like a sad miniseries about factory workers in East Germany.

[…] You’re probably wondering where all this hair is coming from. Remember in your middle school history class, when you learned about the Dutch East India Company? They would travel all over Asia and India for spices to ship on the spice route to the New World. That mercantile route is essentially the same geographical route hair travels to get to actresses in Los Angeles. Locks of hair are culled from women in Asia and India, but instead of the Dutch East India Company, you get them from places in downtown Los Angeles with names like Divastyles Human Hair by Giovanna.

If you think about where your hair came from for too long, it can be very sad. So I prefer to tell myself vague lies. Like, maybe these are all deeply spiritual women and cutting off their hair is part of some beautiful religious ritual, so they were going to do it anyway, and now they’re just getting paid for it; which is better than the reality that all these women are Fantine and we are monsters stealing their hair.

Kaling also discusses her weight. She describes being alarmed initially by the number of women and girls who approached her and told her she inspired them by rocking a body that wasn’t a size 00. Kaling has her own body-image issues, but insists that she doesn’t see herself as a role model like that. She’s just incapable of maintaining a diet, loves McDonald’s and doesn’t really care. Actually McDonald’s came up so frequently in this book that I found myself craving a Big Mac and then I got one and remembered how disgusting they are.

Not really caring about what other people think of her is a pretty big theme in this book, and according to Kaling she didn’t really feel that way until she had success and money. That doesn’t stop her from calling out bullshit double-standards:

I laugh thinking about if they ever tried to do “Who Wore It Best?” for men’s magazines. They wouldn’t, because no one would care. Men don’t care which men looked better in the same clothes because it’s so obviously a huge waste of time. It’s also why they don’t have astrology sections in men’s magazines.

Other topics that Kaling addresses in this book:

• Being a bridesmaid sucks.
• Filming sex scenes is “the tits” and all the celebrities who say it’s awful are lying.
• Her romance with a white-house staffer.
• Getting drunk in college.

Why Not Me? straddles the line somewhere between celebrity memoir and humorous essays. It’s light and fizzy, never maudlin, but also somewhat lacking in substance. Kaling mentions subjects like being a woman of color in Hollywood, but she doesn’t spend a lot of time discussing them and it’s more of an acknowledgement of “yes, I do not fit in here,” then any real contemplation of it. I can’t really fault her for that because it’s her autobiography and she can talk about whatever she damn well pleases, but sometimes I was disappointed because she’d bring up a subject (like the death of her mother) and then never really go into it and I felt like the person who barges in on someone’s conversation looking for more detail. “Wait what happened?” It felt like I was being given little crumbs of a story, and I wanted to know more. To be fair, I never read Kaling’s first book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? so it’s possible those were topics she’s already covered.

My favorite part of this book was Kaling’s analysis of her own success. She chalks a lot of it up to a sense of entitlement, but specifies that you can’t have entitlement without hard work to back it up or you’re just an asshole. She describes spending days sitting on the floor, unshowered, rewriting scripts for her show until they are perfect and her own exhaustion and body odor reach their zenith.

Her advice for achieving success:

• No matter how good you have it, it’s cool to want more.
• Self-pity gets results.
• Sometimes you can get a second chance.
• Sometimes you get a third chance.
• Never take a vacation [her show was canceled during her first vacation in years].
• Austin Mahone has a bright future as a singer and youth-brand spokesperson.
• It’s OK to drink tequila in the car if you just had a really good meeting.
• “If you believe in yourself and work hard, your dreams will come true.”
• “Well… I guess the people who work hard whose dreams don’t come true don’t get to write books about it, so we never really find out what happens to them. So…”
• “If you believe in yourself and work hard, you have a fighting shot at having your dreams come true.”

For me, Why Not Me? but it was a fast read and not the type of book I’d keep to savor forever. The messages about success and positive body image were great, but I didn’t feel like a lot of it lingered once I closed the book. Given the hardcover price, I’d recommend curious readers wait for a library copy.