Mindy Kaling sits down with a sold-out crowd

Comic actress and best-selling author Mindy Kaling spoke to a sold-out crowd last weekend at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, the latest large-scale book event hosted there by Live Talks Los Angeles. It was the fastest-selling event ever in the series, said producer Ted Habte-Gabr.

It was one of 25 planned Live Talks book events across the Los Angeles area this fall, including an Oct. 19 appearance at the Alex by movie director and Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam. “What can I say, I love what I do,” Habte-Gabr said afterwards, “and nothing is more pleasing than a sold-out show, working at a great venue, and a surprise or two.”

Last Sunday’s Kaling appearance was timed to her second book, “Why Not Me?,” currently at the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-sellers list. Kaling was interviewed onstage by Matt Warburton, a writer and executive producer on her TV comedy, “The Mindy Project,” now available on Hulu.

Fans arrived early, and according to Habte-Gabr, some traveled from across the U.S. and as far as India. The show began when a drone flew above the stage to take a group portrait of the audience excitedly holding up their books.

The actress, who was first discovered by fans during her years on “The Office,” published her first memoir, “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns),” in 2011. “How did you know it was time to write another book?” asked Warburton.

“So much had happened in my public life and my personal life that there are so many stories that I left out of this book, and since then I’ve been interviewed hundreds of times, and the same questions kept coming up over and over again ...” she started, but paused as a high-pitched sound could be heard rising in theater.

“That’s a cool sound. You like that, right,” she said. “Is that me?”

While she did talk some about her time on “The Office,” most of her thoughts revolved around her current show, which she also writes and produces. “People think that I’m a lot like my character. There are certain superficial similarities,” she said of the anxious character at its center. “As I discovered in writing the show, each character on the show represents a different part of my personality.”

While her new book often touches on personal events in her life, she said she hoped people didn’t worry that she was only mining them for material, suggesting her writing on “The Mindy Project” wasn’t the same as the music of Taylor Swift, where “you have a conversation with her and she’ll turn it into a song or something?” she said to laughs. “In four years on the show, we’ve never based any guy on any one guy I dated. We thought it was more fun to create things out of thin air.”

The evening was a balance of personal anecdotes and silliness, as when Warburton asked her: “Hottest president of all time. And you can’t pick JFK or Obama.”

“Um ... Ulysses S. Grant,” she said. “He likes to party.”

Already successful in television and as an author, Kaling said she hoped to spend more time with friends and her father, and mentioned the dream of having her own fashion line. In her personal life, she has made no plans for a large wedding.

“Marriage is a beautiful thing. My parents had an incredible marriage,” she said. “I really respect that institution and I’m kind of in awe of it. Weddings are less interesting to me. I think for the average woman who gets married, the wedding is one of the handful of times in your life when you get to have someone do your hair and makeup ... and a beautiful gown. And I think I get to do that a lot.

“Tomorrow I’m going to work at 6 a.m. and for two adults there, their entire job is to make me palatable.”

For more information on the Live Talks author series at the Alex and elsewhere, see livetalksla.org.