Outside Office Hours

Don't mind the lateral lisp, that slushy sound escaping around her s's and z's. It's the plate tectonics of her mouth, Mindy Kaling explains. Her orthodontist told her that if she didn't get braces, her mandible and maxilla would continue to drift out of alignment until her jaw protruded forward, lending her an almost Neanderthaloid aspect. Which, if you think about it--and Kaling did--could have been sort of funny.

Visible braces could also have been funny. "I figured there aren't that many actresses with braces," she says. "Nobody is tuning in to see me because, like, 'Whoa, she's got such straight teeth.'" She asked Paul Lieberstein, an executive producer on the NBC sitcom The Office, if her character Kelly Kapoor could have braces; he replied that he preferred her without flagrant orthodontia. "He's never asked me to get a boob job or lose weight," Kaling says, "so if he wants me to get interior braces, I will."

The braces mean Kaling has lost the gap between her two front teeth, which she was proud of since she noticed as a child that David Letterman has one too. "He kind of made gaps cool," she says. "As a kid, it's adorable to have a gap in your teeth. But then, because of the shifting in my mouth, I started whistling through it, and as a 32-year-old woman, whistling while you speak is sort of annoying."

Again, it was also sort of funny.

So the gap is gone, but now she has the slight lisp, plus a steady diet of soft foods--like pancakes at 4 p.m., which she is shoveling down at a bakery in West Hollywood. "I've always thought it was really boring and tiresome when people talk about their braces, and now all I talk about is my braces," Kaling says. "I've become one of those people."

But she's not one of those people. Kaling won't admit it, but she totally knows: nobody thinks she is boring or tiresome. She has become a beloved actress, TV writer and now author--her new collection, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), is half memoir, half comedy bits--and she's perhaps the most famous "cultural Hindu" (her words) on American television thanks to her portrayal of The Office's boy-crazy, Machiavellian chatterbox Kapoor.

"Girls and gay men really respond to me," she says. "Not to sound all braggy about it."

Kaling has written 23 episodes of The Office and has given the series much of its comic DNA. "Those cheerful and offbeat and surprising notes--a lot of the tone of the show was invented by Mindy," says B.J. Novak, her fellow co-executive producer and cast member. She's also one of the most persistent writers on staff, according to Novak: "She will keep believing it and pushing it until everyone comes around to her point of view." (For instance, staffers were initially skeptical about a 2006 Kaling episode that revealed authoritarian dweeb Dwight Schrute to be a serious recorder player who can mesmerize children with German folk songs.) "In some ways," Novak says, "she's the writer with the most confidence here."