Happy for You

“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.