Claire Stanford Bücher

Four years into her unfinished philosophy dissertation, Evelyn Kominsky Kumamoto feels stalled and uncertain about accepting her long-term boyfriend Jamie's marriage proposal. While Jamie is eager to commit, even her reserved Japanese father has found new love after her mother's passing. Surrounded by privacy-invading apps and self-optimization messaging, Evelyn struggles to define her own desires. Seeking change, she takes a job as a researcher at a prominent internet company in San Francisco, tasked with developing an app to quantify and enhance happiness. As she navigates the bewildering tech culture and its excesses, an unexpected personal development challenges her assumptions about her future. This journey leads her toward discovering an authentic happiness that is uniquely hers. Wry, touching, and sharply attuned to the complexities of modern life, the narrative explores the ambivalence, isolation, and illusion of control that permeate contemporary existence. It movingly illustrates how, even in a mediated world, our emotions and vulnerabilities possess a transformative power that can lead to unexpected revelations.