During my years-long PhD program in English literature, I barely read for fun. The summer after I graduated, I found an ironic cure for my pleasure reading rut: fiction books about academia. Whether it was to reflect upon and process the last six years, or to commemorate the end of a huge life chapter, I read these books voraciously: R.F. Kuang’s Babel, Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation, Claire Stanford’s Happy for You. I realized that all of them were about being Asian in the Humanities, specifically.
A year later, I am still thinking about these books, and I got to speak with my friend and fellow UCLA alumna Claire Stanford about fiction writing, academia, and her poignant prose. Claire’s book, Happy for You, was published by Viking in 2022, and was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. She holds a PhD in English from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota, and she is currently an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Bookish Brews Snapshot
Happy for You by Claire Stanford
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
🏢 Corporate World 📘 Standalone ✒️ Debut Author 💪 Feminist
- Genre: Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Science Fiction
Writing in Fiction & Academia
Lilly Lu: Happy for You is about a mixed race Asian woman, Evelyn Kominsky Kumamoto, who is what we call ABD–all but dissertation–in her PhD Philosophy program, and leaves academia to work in Silicon Valley on an app that aims to track and augment users’ happiness. How did this idea emerge for you? How did you approach writing academia in fiction, and representing the particular weirdness of academia? How did you approach representing the particular weirdness of tech, which I would assume is a different kind of weirdness?
Claire Stanford: Happy for You started with the idea for the app and grew from there. I was interested in exploring the way that everything – even something as complex and undefinable as emotions and happiness – felt like it was on track to being oversimplified as part of the algorithm. In thinking about Evelyn, I wanted to write a narrator/protagonist who has felt uncategorizable all her life and see what would happen when she enters this world that is so focused on categories. She’s a philosopher – or a philosopher-in-training – because she’s interested in the complexities of life, in the gray areas, and over the course of the book she learns how to be more comfortable dwelling in complexity.
Evelyn isn’t having a terrible time in her program when she takes a leave of absence, but she is stuck in writing her dissertation – and more than being stuck on writing her dissertation, she feels stuck in life. She’s in her early thirties and watching her peers making major life decisions – buying houses, getting married, having children – and she doesn’t feel ready for any of that for many reasons, including being a graduate student. So a major part of the book’s interest in academia is Evelyn’s ambivalence surrounding it and the way she, at least initially, feels trapped by it and eager to engage more directly with the world.
For the weirdness of tech, tech is clearly an absurd place (as is academia, in a different way), especially in terms of financial excess, which is an entirely new concept to Evelyn. A lot of the humor in the book comes from these sections, but I think these sections are also ominous, thinking through the reach of surveillance technology and also the absurdity that all of our bodies and minds are being so deeply affected by a very small, primarily male, primarily white group of people who are creating and disseminating this technology.
Lilly Lu: Happy for You does a beautiful job of navigating so many things at once and so seamlessly: navigating cultural identity, navigating academia and industry, navigating what it means to be happy as a woman in your thirties. Evelyn is in a Philosophy program, and we were in an English program, both predominantly white fields. I’m wondering if you could talk about your experience navigating the discipline and carving out a space for yourself?
Claire Stanford: This is a great question! I think the most important thing I did was picking a dissertation topic that I truly believed in and was willing to fight for; my dissertation was on the representation of the Asian American body as posthuman, and this felt like a really urgent topic to me, both in a sociohistorical context but also in my real life, as an Asian American woman. And next most important was finding a committee – and particularly a dissertation chair – who really believed in the idea and also in my work. It was also hugely important, of course, to find allies in other scholars and emerging scholars, folks who helped me navigate opaque systems and who could discuss microaggressions with me and help me feel like I wasn’t alone.
In Happy for You, Evelyn also is navigating white spaces – both in academia, in her philosophy program, and in the tech world – and she is also experiencing microaggressions, from a fellow philosopher assuming she has something to say about Buddhist philosophy on a panel (she doesn’t) to a beta test that won’t allow her to select both Asian American and white on a drop-down menu as her race (she, like me, is half-Asian).
Lilly Lu: My academic research centered on British novel history, imperialism, and the construction of whiteness, and although seemingly disparate from my identity (Asian American), my lived experiences in the academy seeped into every part of my dissertation. I found that both my academic writing and creative writing are mutually generative and come from what Edward Said calls the worldliness of the scholar: the critic’s inextricability from the world. People think of academics as siloed off from the world, as brains in jars, as recluses, but we cannot ignore that our lives inform our work. Can you talk a little bit about how, or to what extent, your lived experiences in academia have shaped your representations of academia in writing? And how your lived experiences have influenced either your fiction or your scholarship–or both?
Claire Stanford: My lived experiences have definitely shaped my work, both creative and scholarly. In terms of writing about academia in fiction, Evelyn’s experience draws on my own feelings of being adrift while I was a PhD student and wondering if I was on the right path in life. She takes a leave of absence to work at a tech company (the third-most popular internet company in the world), which is not something I’ve ever done, but it was a way for me to imagine different paths my life might take.
And I certainly also agree that lived experience can’t help but inform our scholarship! In my case, it’s a direct connection. As an Asian American woman, I was increasingly incensed by the constant portrayal of Asian American women as posthuman in science fiction – as robots, as cyborgs, docile and sexualized – and I wanted to investigate that. Ultimately, I ended up doing some critique, but also writing back to that trope and spotlighting Asian American writers (Franny Choi, Sun Yung Shin, Charles Yu) who are taking that techno-Orientalist stereotype and subverting it or reclaiming it.
Techno-Orientalism refers to the cultural phenomenon in the West – and particularly the U.S. – of equating the future and futuristic technologies with East Asia, and especially Japan. (Early cyberpunk like William Gibson’s Neuromancer and the movie Blade Runner are good examples of techno-Orientalism, though cyberpunk has become much more diverse in recent years.) In my scholarship, I argue that, rather than simply distancing themselves from techno-Orientalism, writers including Choi, Shin, and Yu self-consciously engage with techno-Orientalism, positing an alliance between human and machine that decenters the Western conception of the paradigmatic human as a white male. For me, this argument is not only important in terms of moving the scholarship forward, but also in terms of personal empowerment.
Lilly Lu: We met during my first year of graduate school and your second year, in a creative writing seminar led by the wonderful Fred D’Aguiar. Can you talk to me about your relationship to your creative work then and now?
Claire Stanford: Ah, that was truly a fantastic class! My relationship to my creative work then – meaning early in the PhD program – was fraught. Whenever I would work on my fiction, it felt like I was doing something illicit. I already had an MFA when I started the PhD program at UCLA, and I had planned and hoped to continue writing fiction, but I was finding it difficult to do both, which was really discouraging and heartbreaking. That seminar, and finding Fred as a mentor, was really pivotal for me, to have that level of focus and encouragement on my writing.
My relationship to my creative work now is much less fraught – in fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s not fraught at all? Or at least not any more fraught than anyone who writes, which is to say there are good days and bad days. But now that my first novel is out in the world, and also now that I’m a professor of creative writing, it doesn’t feel like my life is as bifurcated. Nothing about it feels illicit anymore.
Lilly Lu: Fred was actually one of the first professors who told me I could do both creative and critical writing, that they needn’t be siloed off, that I needn’t choose between the two. How have you conceptualized the relationship between your scholarly work and your creative writing? Has it been strange to straddle those two worlds?
Claire Stanford: I think of my creative work and my scholarship as complementing each other – as somewhat separate pursuits that aren’t overlapping, but that inform each other. For example, my dissertation was on the representation of the Asian American body as posthuman, and I think those posthuman elements are also in my fiction. But I think I also developed a separation early on that works well for me, in that I write literary fiction and my scholarship primarily focuses on science fiction. Even then, though, I did often find it strange to straddle the two worlds, to have to toggle between the analytical mode of writing scholarship and the freedom one needs to be able to write fiction.
One way I’ve also approached bridging this divide is that my scholarship has become more hybrid, including my own subjectivity and positionality, moving it in a more creative direction. This methodology is becoming more common in academia – it’s sometimes called autotheory – with really amazing models coming from incredible scholars including Saidiya Hartman and Anna Tsing. This is writing that allows the scholar to be embodied, that recognizes and examines the scholar’s relationship to the subject, and that grounds research and argumentation in lived experience in a way that I consider not only more accessible but more true to life.
Lilly Lu: What advice would you give budding BIPOC writers, academic and/or creative?
Claire Stanford: A piece of advice that truly changed my writing (and my life) was actually something I gleaned while I was TA’ing for Fred in Introduction to Creative Writing. This was early in my time in the PhD program, and he asked the students what was urgent in their work. I had never heard writing framed around urgency, and it was mind-blowing to me. Both my novel and my dissertation came out of questions that felt urgent to me, and through the many dark nights of the soul that came with writing each, I tried to always remember why it was that the project was important to me, urgent to me. For my novel, one of the driving forces was the desire to represent the half-Asian experience (my experience), when I had seen so little of it in literature and other media; in my scholarship, one of the driving forces was investigating why so much science fiction portrays female Asian bodies as posthuman/nonhuman.
This question of urgency really helped me when I would encounter resistance to either project because it was something I could come back to when I was feeling doubt – knowing why my writing felt urgent to me really helped me to believe in it, and to keep trying to get it out in the world.
So, my main advice would be to find a project that you really believe in – that feels urgent to you – and not to compromise because someone doesn’t “get” it. Along with that advice, it’s also important to find the right support network who believes in your writing – agent, editor, first readers, professors and advisors, people who do understand your work and your vision, and are trying to help you make the writing stronger in service of that vision, rather than changing it entirely.
Lilly Lu: What questions, literary or academic or both, are floating around in your mind these days? What’s next for Claire?
Claire Stanford: I’m working on my second novel, which is interested in artmaking and questions around making art while living through the escalating existential threat of climate change; it’s also interested in marriage and the way we change as people over time and different kinds of betrayal. And, speaking of academia, I’m now a professor of creative writing, and I teach both undergraduate and graduate workshops, so another major question on my mind is how to make the creative writing workshop an evermore inclusive and equitable space.
Claire Stanford’s Happy for You is out now from Viking Books. Follow her @clairemiye on Instagram and Twitter or find her at https://www.clairestanford.com
