Kaling, who said she devotes less than a minute to each Tweet — “You know the whole thing where if it takes a long time to write a poem, then you probably shouldn’t be writing poetry? With Tweets, if you’re sitting around for more than 45 seconds, it’s probably not the medium for you”— has 1.5 million followers. She has looked into learning who they are, demographically speaking, but she said: “Ultimately, it became too boring for me to figure out. I just thought 70 percent are probably those Spam sexbots or whatever. But I’ll take the Spam sexbots. That’s fine.”

More likely, many of Kaling’s followers are big fans of “The Office,” the irresistibly awkward NBC sitcom that is in its eighth season. In 2004, when the producer Greg Daniels was gearing up to adapt “The Office” from the BBC show of the same name — in mock-documentary style, both versions chronicle the lives of unglamorous employees of a paper company — he hired Kaling as a writer-performer, after reading a spec script she wrote. “She’s very original,” he said. “If anything feels phony or lazy or passé, she’ll pounce on it.”

When she joined the show, Kaling was 24, new to Los Angeles and the only woman on a writing staff of eight. As she recalls in her comic memoir, “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns),” to be published by Crown Archetype this November, she rented a small apartment on Fairfax Avenue and Fountain Boulevard, which she did not know was the nexus of transvestite social life in West Hollywood. “I . . . enjoyed late-night interactions with strangely tall, flat-chested women named Felice or Vivica, who always wanted rides to the Valley. If my life at the time had been a sitcom, an inebriated tranny gurgling, ‘Heeeeey, giiiirrrrrl!’ would have been my ‘Norm!’ ”

In some ways, of course, Kaling’s life is a sitcom, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say a sitcom is her life. These days, “The Office” has 18 writers, four of whom are women, and Kaling — who still lives in West Hollywood but now, at 32, owns a four-bedroom house — has ascended to a position of power: in addition to continuing to write and act for the show, she is an executive producer and has also directed two episodes. She’s admired by her colleagues for tackling juicy emotional conflicts. “I always call her the best writer on our staff,” Daniels told me over the phone. “It’s probably completely the wrong thing to do.”