A Review of Claire Stanford’s Happy for You (Viking, 2022)

Posted by: ccape

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape



A sparkling, eminently readable debut from Claire Stanford’s Happy for You (Viking, 2022)! Let’s let the marketing description give us something to work off of: “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.”

I read this novel not long after Kyle Lucia Wu’s Win Me Something, so it’s a great to see such complicated and robust depictions of mixed race Asian American protagonists. And, I also read this not long after Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation, so I’ve been thinking about the often-vexed experience of Asian Americans in academic settings. In any case, the real philosophical dilemma that Evelyn is wrestling with is that common one we all wonder about: what is our pursuit of happiness really about? What is it that is driving us forward? Evelyn doesn’t seem to fully know herself, which is partly why she takes on the new job, which seems to be a larger manifestation of the many crosswords her life is taking. Her relationship with her father is under serious change, her relationship with her partner is reaching new milestones, and then she’s wondering what it is that she really wants to do for her work! Sprinkled in between such incredibly difficult life questions is Evelyn’s obsession with an animal television show called Misfits. I absolutely loved these asides because it’s actually something that I do too: I like learning about new animals, often ones that have unique characteristics. My jam is finding out if there are any new Lazarus taxon additions: those animals that we thought had gone extinct (like the coelacanth) only to reappear sometimes many decades after their last sighting. In any case, the concept of the animal misfit is perhaps an analogue to Evelyn’s own experiences, given that she’s not sure she fits in with academics or with the tech-savvy culture of Silicon Valley. Then there’s the question of whether or not she sees herself as a mother or not. The other interesting element that really pushes the novel in terms of its momentum is the work that Evelyn’s doing for the new tech company she’s involved in. She’s essentially tasked with helping develop an app that tracks individual happiness, but such an occupational pursuits leads to many doubts. Should she really care that much about tracking her happiness to the point where it would be documented on an app? Evelyn’s ambivalence about the app leads to a number of interesting conversations and thought pieces throughout the novel, giving readers quite a lot to contemplate. A spritely, quirky work grounded by an unconventional, yet winning narrator!

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