Mindy Kaling Brings A New Nerd To TV, And Finds She 'Was Not Alone' As A Teen

Kaling was initially hesitant to revisit her teen years for the project: "Like a lot of comedy writers, I think of my adolescence and childhood as incredibly embarrassing," she says. That's actually something that now, when I have so many younger writers, many of whom are minorities or young women, I have really been confronted with, OK, we have to kind of do what Greg did, because my natural inclination is if someone is fighting with me and I'm their boss is to quell it by screaming. KALING: So the story of why we did the show was a little bit unromantic in that I was approached by Netflix, by an executive named Brooke Kessler, who had read both of my books and loved the sections about when I was a teenager. And those are pretty short sections because, like a lot of comedy writers, I think of my adolescence and childhood as incredibly embarrassing and painful (laughter). And that's actually something that, now, when I have so many younger writers - many of whom are minorities or young women - like, I have really been confronted with, OK, we have to kind of do what Greg did, because my natural inclination is if someone is fighting with me and I'm their boss is to quell it (laughter) by screaming at them. She co-created and is the main writer of the new Netflix series, "Never Have I Ever," about an Indian American high school sophomore who's very smart and is considered nerdy, unattractive and unpopular. If - the real reason I did it was it was my only way to dip my toes into the waters of comedy that was free and accessible because you couldn't just be like, hey, I want to go write for "Saturday Night Live." And I was scared for years that that would be the only way that I'd remember my mother, which was sick and tired and bedridden and - but I will say that, in having some distance from the time that she's died and particularly by having a daughter, I have been able to let that part of her life kind of recess in my memory. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, our guests will be Alia Volz, whose parents had a roaring business baking and selling marijuana-laced brownies to hippies, artists, office workers and activists in San Francisco in the '70s. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Mooj Zadie, Thea Challoner and Seth Kelley.