Happy for You
Ratings3
Average rating4.7
15
Ratings3
Average rating4.7
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY GLAMOUR, ELECTRIC LIT, AND THE MILLIONS “Engrossing and clever . . . Stanford captures the allure, absurdity and menace of corporate spaces with wit and levity . . . Anyone who has resisted fitting neatly into an algorithm will find a companion in Evelyn, and in this book.” —The New York Times Book Review “The optimal novel for the strange times we find ourselves in.” —Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin A whip-smart, funny, affecting novel about a young woman who takes a job at a tech company looking to break into the “happiness market”—even as her own happiness feels more unknowable than ever Four years into writing her still-unfinished philosophy dissertation, and anticipating a marriage proposal from her long-term boyfriend, Evelyn Kominsky Kumamoto is wrestling with big questions about life: How can she do meaningful work in the world? Is she ready for marriage—and motherhood? But no one else around her seems to share her ambivalence. Her relentlessly optimistic, Midwestern boyfriend has no hesitation about making a lifelong commitment; her best friend, Sharky, seems to have wholeheartedly embraced his second-choice career as a trend forecaster; and her usually reserved father has thrown himself headlong into a new relationship—his first since her mother’s passing when Evelyn was fourteen. Swallowing her doubts, Evelyn makes a leap, leaving academia for a job as a researcher at the third-most popular internet company, where her team is tasked with developing an app that will help users quantify and augment their happiness. Confronting Silicon Valley’s norm-reinforcing algorithms and predominantly white culture, she struggles to find belonging: as a biracial person, as an Asian American, and as someone who doesn’t know how to perform social media’s vision of what womanhood should look like. As her misgivings mount, an unexpected development upends her assumptions about her future, and Evelyn embarks on a journey toward an authentic happiness all her own. Wry, touching, and sharply attuned to the ambivalence, atomization, and illusion of control that characterize modern life, Happy for You is a story of a young woman at a crossroads that movingly explores how, even in this mediated world, our emotions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities have a transformative power we could never predict.
Reviews with the most likes.
“How was it possible that I knew so much about how to think, but so little about what to do? On some level, I knew I was overthinking things, but from where I stood, it seemed as if everyone else was underthinking things and I was thinking about them the right amount.”
It's possible I've never related to a protagonist quite as much as I did in this moment. (I can't say so definitively, because then I'd have to think back on every book that's ever resonated with me to be sure ... oh, what's that? I'm overthinking?)
Evelyn Kominsky Kumamoto has just left her PhD program, following the siren song of late-stage capitalism and the private sector - specifically, Big Tech. When we meet her, she's just started working at “the third-most popular internet company,” and she's in disbelief that she's actually making money as a researcher - enough that she can splurge on fancy cheese and fresh-cut flowers on her way home. (“A woman with fresh-cut flowers on the dining room table was a real woman, a real person.”) But before long, doubts start creeping in. Her team is working on an app designed to quantify and optimize users' happiness. It's no spoiler to say: yikes. Or to note that Evelyn, who is half-Japanese, seems to be picking up on things her predominantly white coworkers, especially her single-minded manager, aren't ignoring so much as not seeing at all.
Evelyn's ambivalence and low-level sense of existential dread extends beyond work, too. Does she want to marry Jamie, her long-term, irrepressibly - sometimes to the point of ignorantly - optimistic boyfriend? (There's a bizarrely romantic, exceptionally written moment involving ticks.) Does she want to be a mother? What does she want out of her relationship with her father?
This is such a timely book. It didn't so much raise new questions as better articulate ones that have been percolating in my brain for some time (I'm a UX researcher working in tech, so...) The ending seemed a tiny bit pat to me, but in a way that felt less like a cop-out and more like a relief. I've mentioned I'm not a huge book-club person, but this is a book I'd love to discuss.
Evelyn sets aside her dissertation to go to work for the third-most popular internet company, using her knowledge of philosophy to work on a happiness app.
That's all I'll say about the plot. But let me say a little about why I enjoyed it so much.
I just floated through the reading of this book. It's everything I look for in a good book...quirky characters...uncertainty in the main character about how to proceed through life...gentle humor...a working-out of issues to the benefit of all...unexpected kindness...truth...a bit of philosophy...and a little more gentle humor.
