Why Not Me? (28 page)

7:03 PM

7:04 PM

7:04 PM

UNLIKELY LEADING LADY

I
WAS BEING INTERVIEWED
at a restaurant for a flashy, nationally circulated magazine. It started out well enough. The journalist met me for brunch at a restaurant near my house. He then almost immediately began writing down everything I ate. This was a little odd because this wasn’t a fitness or food magazine, but I didn’t think too much of it. Maybe those kinds of details make the general public fall in love with you: “Ms. Kaling ate her omelet with a dedication I’m sure she applies to her career.” I began to put jam on my toast.

“Not too careful with the calories, Mindy?” the journalist asked with a mischievous glint in his eye. I was taken aback.

Did he seriously just ask me that?

How do you answer such a question? Why would someone
ask
such a question? I mumbled something about liking jam and moved on. Later though, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Clearly what he meant when he said I wasn’t “too careful with the calories” was: “Shouldn’t you be more careful with the calories, Mindy?” I seriously doubt he would have said that to a slender woman. And there’s no way he’s saying that to a man. Because a man would respond: “Are you seriously writing down what I eat and, like, criticizing me about it? Fuck off, dude.” The strangest part was the journalist didn’t think this was a weird question. In fact, if you read the interview, he includes it in the article.

If that had been an isolated incident, I would’ve ignored it and filed it away in my mental file cabinet of “people who have bad manners and must have been raised by criminals.”

But the thing is, he’s not the only person who’s interested.

I have a complicated relationship with my body. Or rather, I have a complicated relationship with my
stance
on my body. It is new and strange to me that I am now a person who has to have a “stance” on her body, since before I was on television I felt pretty detached from it. I thought of it as the vehicle that carried me to and from places my brain wants to go, like my car. In the past few years, however, I have found that people are preoccupied with it. So I decided I should try to reflect on it in some (hopefully smart) way.

Young women often approach me and excitedly tell me how much they appreciate the way I look. They like that I am not a skinny twig, because it shows that I refuse to change who I am and makes them feel like they don’t have to either. I really love that.

But what they don’t know is that I’m a big fat fraud. I’m completely
not
at peace with how I look. I don’t wake up in the morning, look at my naked body in the mirror, and say, “Good morning, body. Once again, you’ve nailed it, you gorgeous imperfect thing. That wobbly patch of cellulite? A miracle. Each stretch mark? A Picasso. Holy crap, I look good! Who can I sext? Somebody else has got to see
this
!”

Most mornings, I wake up, rub the sleep out of my eyes, walk past the mirror, stop, and mutter, “Yikes,” then quickly shuffle off to the shower.

I AM SO REAL

This is an example of the kind of thing that is most often said about me in the media:

“It’s so refreshing that Mindy Kaling doesn’t try to conform to any normal standards of beauty. She is just so real. I love that about her.”