Happy for You
A Novel
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4.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stanford debuts with a resonant meditation on what it means to be happy in an increasingly tech-saturated world. Evelyn Kominsky Kumamoto is grinding through the dissertation for her philosophy graduate program when she gets a lucrative job offer from the "third-most-popular internet company." She is hired as a researcher for a new happiness app—Joyfull—which will use an algorithm and users' answers to questions about, for instance, how likable they think they are, to measure users' happiness and guide them toward an even higher rating. As the app gets up and running, tension brews between Evelyn and her boyfriend, Jamie, due to her uncertainty about marriage. Then Evelyn gets unexpectedly pregnant, and the Joyfull app brings her ambivalence into stark relief ("Was I likable? I clicked SOMEWHAT AGREE. I paused. I changed it to SOMEWHAT DISAGREE"). Her happiness score of 7.1 not only seems to result in her employment status remaining at the probationary level, it makes her feel further from understanding how happiness feels and what makes for a happy life. At turns thoughtful, funny, and startling, Stanford's writing perfectly captures her protagonist's aimlessness. Those who enjoyed The Startup Wife will find much to love.
