Contemporary Authors

• The Glitch: ( novel) Doubleday (New York, NY), 2018

• Elisabeth Cohen - https://www.elisabethcohen.com/about/

  BIO
  Elisabeth's work has appeared in The Mississippi Review, The Cincinnati Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney's, and The Millions. She graduated from Princeton University and has an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and an MLS from the University of Maryland. She works as a medical editor and lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and two sons.

• Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2018/05/the-rumpus-mini-interview-project-134-elisabeth-cohen/

  QUOTED: "Shelley’s strategy is to be oblivious. Sometimes she notices something, but then she suppresses it. It helps, I think, that she doesn’t really think of herself as living in a woman’s body."
  "She’s a person who’s always gotten credit for being smart and considers her mind the most vital part of her, and her body is like a very fancy burlap sack she hops around in. She even decides it makes more sense to outsource her second pregnancy. Her body is like a computer case and what matters is what’s inside. She isn’t that bothered by objectification because she, too, sees her body as an object."

  THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #134: ELISABETH COHEN
  BY JENNIFER BANNAN
  May 3rd, 2018
  Elisabeth Cohen’s debut novel, The Glitch, does a marvelous job of questioning what women have to gain from the effort to “lean in.”

  This story is Shelley Stone’s, the CEO of Conch, a hot wearables company. Shelley has mastered the art of the standing nap, takes a men’s multivitamin because she refuses to participate in her own oppression, has studied how to give the perfect handshake (pressure 7.5 out of 10), and builds her TED Talk around her experience being struck by lightning as a teenager—to illustrate the level of power needed to trounce the competition.

  She’s in for some life-changing occurrences, from a brief disappearance of her four-year-old daughter, to the arrival of her doppelgänger on the scene, to a major glitch in her company’s technology that is resulting in user casualties.

  Cohen and I talked about the book over the phone in March.

  ***

  The Rumpus: Our businesspeople, our CEOs, particularly in sexy fields like Silicon Valley tech, have become our cultural heroes. Women want to be a part of that, and some get to the top, like Shelley Stone. But the top can be an empty place that ignores important ways of being. While Shelley seems to blame what she misses—a real connection to her children, for example—on her own character, it becomes obvious to the reader that she’s actively suppressing the non-work side of herself. Do you think women in the business world should talk more about how the system is flawed, instead of suppressing themselves?

  Elisabeth Cohen: Yes, I think they should, and I admire those who do. That said, women leading huge companies are outliers, and they’ve already made tradeoffs that many of us might find intolerable. And if the system has rewarded you specifically, maybe you don’t think it’s such a bad system, and maybe you aren’t well positioned to understand the problems others face.

  Rumpus: How many TED Talks have you watched? Shelley’s was such an excellent send-up.

  Cohen: The idea of TED Talks seems to be that if you take this knowledge pill (that goes down in a slow fifteen to eighteen minutes), you’ll grasp secrets of social psychology or epidemiology or economics that otherwise take decades to learn. A couple of hours and you can master human knowledge—the juicy parts, anyway. It’s the idea of the shortcut that bothers me. Also the way video almost exists as its own fact. When you’re reading and something doesn’t make sense, you can reread a few paragraphs. Video rolls onward and is a pain to stop and rewind. If something doesn’t quite make sense, I just assume I wasn’t paying enough attention. It makes video very persuasive and well-suited to a post-fact world. (I really don’t want to live in a post-fact world).

  Rumpus: To get ahead she had to ignore blatant misogyny—the blow-up doll in the broom closet that everyone knew about, the creepy VC who would fondle a stainless steel speculum when interviewing female candidates. What is meant by Shelley’s refusal to grapple with sexism?

  Cohen: The #MeToo movement happened after I’d written this, and it has led me to reconsider Shelley’s take. I think she hasn’t reached the point of considering whether she has an obligation to speak up.

  Women I know who have done well in male-dominated fields, they either tend to be extremely optimistic and good at exerting force field-like boundaries, or extremely hardworking, smart, and driven, or extremely okay with strip clubs. Shelley’s strategy is to be oblivious. Sometimes she notices something, but then she suppresses it. It helps, I think, that she doesn’t really think of herself as living in a woman’s body. She’s a person who’s always gotten credit for being smart and considers her mind the most vital part of her, and her body is like a very fancy burlap sack she hops around in. She even decides it makes more sense to outsource her second pregnancy. Her body is like a computer case and what matters is what’s inside. She isn’t that bothered by objectification because she, too, sees her body as an object.

  Rumpus: The toxicity aside, Shelley deals with plain old stress. I could see how there might be similarities between Shelley’s pace and a successful author’s.

  Cohen: I wrote parts of this book between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. I had gotten to a point where all the normal stress-coping things like yoga, meditation apps, running, and wine just weren’t cutting it anymore. What then, you know? And I had the extra stress of wanting to publish a book and worrying that I wouldn’t ever do it. As I got older, that became more intense.

  But is it worth it? I guess I want to be known for something besides running the dishwasher eight times per weekend. Writing is, for me, maybe like what religious faith is for some people. It gives me space and dimension beyond the lunch-packing and emailing and living as a logistical animal. It’s something extra.

  Rumpus: About the Mary Shelley reference. Between her name and the use of lightning, it seemed you were comparing the CEO woman to Frankenstein’s monster.

  Cohen: I love reading accounts of busy women’s days—the ones who hop out of bed at 5 a.m., work all day, pick up the kids, make dinner, clean up, “log on” again. We’re supposed to see the best working mom as the most productive, but productivity is defined in very narrow terms. I like the old idea, which you don’t hear very much anymore, that maybe seeing a play or reading a book or taking an interesting trip could give you what you need to know to lead a company or plan a war. Like Peggy Olson in Mad Men, going out to see a movie in the middle of the day to get ideas. That’s more the life I aspire to.

  Rumpus: The girl Michelle, whom Shelley temporarily thinks of as her former self materialized, is pretty unimpressed with Shelley’s life. What do you think your former self would say to you today if you stood face-to-face?

  Cohen: “Excuse me, ma’am,” as she dashes by.

  In my “young youth,” as Muriel Spark puts it, I really thought I would grow up to have a life that was very exciting, or very successful, or possibly very tragic. I wasn’t expecting to be so into dogs.

  I think my younger self would be happy I’ve stayed with my writing and am still friends with some of my old friends. I think she’d find my children confusing, and also be surprised by how much time I spend exercising. I think she’d be less surprised than I am that I have a book coming out. She’d probably think it was a step in the right direction.

  ***

  Author photograph © James Browning.

  Jennifer Bannan is the author of short story collection Inventing Victor, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003. Her novel-in-progress was an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award quarter-finalist. Her work has appeared in ACM, Kenyon Review Online, Passages North, Chicago Quarterly Review, and the Autumn House Press fiction anthology, Keeping the Wolves at Bay. She finished her MFA at the University of Pittsburgh in 2014 and is at work on a novel, Welcome to Kindness. More from this author →

• Entertainment Weekly Online - http://ew.com/books/2018/05/17/two-of-this-summers-biggest-authors-debate-workplace-dramas-and-writing-women-on-the-edge/

  QUOTED: "I was out to dinner with my husband — a rare grown-up night out — and I was telling him about this profile of Marissa Mayer I’d seen in Vogue. There was a photo of her posed upside-down on a lawn chair, wearing a tight dress, with her hair falling down. She’s lying there as if she’s a mannequin waiting for someone to come along and set her upright. I thought, it was a really bad call for her to pose like that."
  "That photo drove me nuts. I can’t really explain why. It wasn’t like I’d lost out on the Yahoo job to her. I was miserable at work, and I didn’t want to hear all the “Lean In” stuff in the air just then, and I was writing a novel that wasn’t interesting, even to me. So I was giving this extended critique while my husband ate tapas and drank a lot of wine. Finally he sat back and said, you should write a novel about a female CEO."

  SEIJA RANKIN
  May 17, 2018 at 11:00 AM EDT
  This summer’s titles cover a range of topics: From campus cult leaders to Hamptons divorce drama to buzzy memoirs to crime of every sort (#beachreads). But this month sees two highly-anticipated titles that tackle the topic of over-achieving in the most fascinating of ways.

  First up is Eliza Kennedy’s Do This For Me (on shelves now) which can be best described as the most deliciously over-the-top divorce tale. Raney Moore is a higher-than-high-power attorney who suddenly discovers her husband’s infidelity and, well, she doesn’t take it very lightly. In one fell swoop she cancels his credit cards, moves out (children in tow), and hacks into his Twitter account for some swift sabotage. In what will not come as a shock, she quickly regrets this decision and begins to call into question all of her long-held beliefs about what marriage and infidelity really mean — and how she can reconcile her self-image with her home life.

  In The Glitch, by Elisabeth Cohen (out May 22), our heroine is Shelley Stone — think of her as Marissa Mayer or Sheryl Sandberg on steroids. She works out at 3:30 a.m., she puts sex with her husband into her Outlook calendar, she is obsessed with multivitamins. But after meeting someone with her exact same name (who also bears an uncanny resemblance to herself), she starts to wonder whether this lifestyle is causing her to lose what little grip on reality she had to begin with.

  Below, the two authors put their heads together to discuss the inspiration behind their books, how the #MeToo movement has affected the workplace, and just how they conjured these fascinating women.

  Elisabeth Cohen: The first part of your book is a gripping revenge fantasy come to life, in which Raney finds out that her husband is cheating and responds with pure, unadulterated vengeance. Part of the fun of her revenge — until it goes too far — is that it also feels like a revolt against social media. Was it fun to write something so extreme?
  Eliza Kennedy: First of all, thank you for reading Do This For Me, and congratulations on The Glitch! Part of the success of any novel is how much fun it enlists on the reader’s behalf, and I wanted to make an ordinarily dreary subject — infidelity— fun. So I made Raney, my heroine, a take-no-prisoners litigator, and I made her rage at the discovery of her husband Aaron’s affair all-consuming. In the space of a few hours she cancels his credit cards, cuts off his phone, empties their home, and moves out with their children. Finally, she hacks his Twitter and takes aim at the reputation he’s cultivated as a beloved science celebrity. It’s extreme, even a little diabolical, and Raney herself comes to regret what she’s done. But for a little while, I wanted her — and readers — to live the ultimate avenging fantasy of every wronged spouse.

  EC: A novel that begins with infidelity seems like it’ll inevitably end with the couple either reconciling or splitting for good. Did you find it difficult to weigh whether Aaron and Raney should end up together, and how their relationship would play out after his affair?
  EK: Again, the affair in fiction is usually so bleak. I wanted to veer from the script and ask: What is sex? What is marriage? What is a wife, a mother, a professional woman? Her husband’s affair is the catalyst that causes Raney to search for answers to these questions, to figure out who she is and what she really wants. The only conclusion that I wanted to convey was that Raney’s happily-ever-after — whatever it ended up being — needed to depend on her, and not on a man.

  EC: At one point, Raney has a paralegal summarize for her some causes of infidelity, as if she’s having him do research for a case. I’m sure you’ve read Esther Perel’s take that sexual desire is fundamentally at odds with the comfort and security of a long-term relationship. Do you think Raney would reject that idea?
  EK: There’s making love, right? And there’s plain old sex. And there’s a spectrum of emotional and intimate states in between. Raney doesn’t understand any of it. (Does anybody? I don’t.) As part of her journey, I wanted her to explore every station of desire, from the most shallow encounter to the most meaningful, almost spiritual bond. In Raney-ish fashion, she throws all her energies into the project, enlisting research help from her minions, pestering her best friend Sarah about why and how she enjoys sex so much, and ultimately, performing some fieldwork of her own. By the end, I think she’d be leery of any grand, one-size-fits-all pronouncement about desire versus security.

  EC: There’s a lot in this book about toxic behavior in the workplace, an especially relevant topic right now. Yet despite the firm’s culture, Raney seems to thrive there, until she begins to notice its effect on younger female associates. How do you think she is able to avoid confronting these issues for so long?
  EK: If the last year has shown anything, it’s that for all our advances toward gender equality, we still live in a world that very much belongs to men. It would be impossible to write a book about a successful professional like Raney and not talk about how she navigated that world as a woman. Pursuing that thread also gave me an opportunity to show sexism from a unique perspective: that of the unwittingly complicit female power broker. Raney doesn’t see the problem because she doesn’t want to see it. She just wants to succeed. It’s not until a young female associate schools Raney in how her attitude has harmed other women that she confronts it, and begins to use her power for good. When I was a Biglaw associate, I was fortunate to work with women partners who fought to make my firm a fair and welcoming place to work. But it wasn’t easy. In a profession that literally exists to create and resolve conflict, it’s impossible to avoid people who will use any perceived advantage to make you feel bad.

  EC: I read that Raney works at the same fictional law firm as the protagonist of your first novel, I Take You. What inspired you to return to that setting with this book? Can we look forward to more stories of bad behavior at Calder Tayfield?
  EK: I spent three years in law school, one year clerking, and five years practicing law. The stories, the characters and the milieu will never get old for me, and probably result in other books about lawyers — and all that we never dared talk about during the 9-to-5. Right now, though, I’m writing the screenplay for Do This For Me, so I’m never far from that world at any given moment.

  ADVERTISING

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  James Browning
  Eliza Kennedy: The Glitch is so many things — corporate satire, techno thriller, poignant family drama, and hilarious portrait of a woman on the edge. Was there a kernel from which it all grew — an image, a scene, an idea that fired your imagination?
  Elisabeth Cohen: I was out to dinner with my husband — a rare grown-up night out — and I was telling him about this profile of Marissa Mayer I’d seen in Vogue. There was a photo of her posed upside-down on a lawn chair, wearing a tight dress, with her hair falling down. She’s lying there as if she’s a mannequin waiting for someone to come along and set her upright. I thought, it was a really bad call for her to pose like that. I also thought, I’m totally judging her on appearance, which is part of what makes it so hard for women to succeed.

  That photo drove me nuts. I can’t really explain why. It wasn’t like I’d lost out on the Yahoo job to her. I was miserable at work, and I didn’t want to hear all the “Lean In” stuff in the air just then, and I was writing a novel that wasn’t interesting, even to me. So I was giving this extended critique while my husband ate tapas and drank a lot of wine. Finally he sat back and said, you should write a novel about a female CEO.

  EK: Some of my favorite sections of the book are those that convey the absolute joy Shelley takes in her work, which is rare in novels. Did any of that rub off in the writing process? Did you feel any secret yearnings to be a ruthless, powerful (if slightly unhinged) tech CEO?
  EC: I think people in jobs like Shelley’s do genuinely love it, at least most of the time. They’re giving so much of themselves over to work. They have to be getting something out of it besides a paycheck. My husband’s grandfather was the head of a company, and listening to him talk about it, you got the sense he wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything.

  I couldn’t physically handle Shelley’s schedule: the spirit is semi-willing, but the flesh is weak. Languor is more my natural speed, though raising children and working has made me more productive and hardworking than I ever thought I’d be. My kids think I’m ruthless and type-A because I make them brush their hair in the morning, but mostly I’m just trying to keep us all afloat.

  EK: Obviously, you finished this book before the #MeToo movement burst onto the scene. Yet some of Shelley’s observations about male-female dynamics in her world seem prescient. How much did the issue of workplace sexism inform your writing?
  EC: Your book tackles this subject so well, Eliza, and I especially love how you delve into the double standard for bad behavior at work. While #MeToo brought to light specific perpetuators, it wasn’t news that these behaviors existed. I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve had only a few run-ins with workplace sexism, but a few is not none. And something doesn’t have to be Harvey-Weinstein-level terrible to hit you hard at a vulnerable moment and discourage you. I was interested in what it would be like to be a woman who seems to have been unaffected by sexism, even as she rises to the top of a male-dominated industry. In Shelley’s case, it’s due to a combination of determination, cluelessness, and luck.

  EK: Shelley’s company produces a device called Conch: a tiny, wearable personal assistant that whispers directions, hints, and admonishments in the user’s ear. Having spent so much time with Shelley, has her voice become a kind of Conch to you? Does she whisper to you about deliverables, action items, and business accountability metrics — or worse, the superiority of quinoa over simple carbs?
  EC: I did have a Shelley-like moment in the razor aisle at Target, gazing at the pink and aqua razors, when I realized I could just buy a man’s razor. I am lucky not to need a Conch to optimize my productivity. I have my mom’s voice stuck in my head, telling me to do things. (And it never needs charging!)

  EK: What are you working on now?
  EC: I’m developing an app that folds laundry. Just kidding. I’m writing about a family, but it’s something totally different.

QUOTED: "Part techno-thriller, part techno-satire, Cohen's debut is a funny, engaging read."

Print Marked Items
The Glitch
Diana Platt
Booklist.
114.16 (Apr. 15, 2018): p19.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text: 
The Glitch.
By Elisabeth Cohen.
May 2018. 368p. Doubleday, $26.95 (9780385542784).
Shelley Stone is a force of nature in the world of wearable tech. She has worked hard to get to CEO, and everything in her life is just as she likes
it--two children (one carried by a "gestational carrier"), "me time" at 3 a.m., regularly scheduled sex, vacations in France (working vacations,
natch). It could be said that it was a force of nature that made her the person she is today: she was struck by lightning as a young woman. She
credits this one-in-a-million event with her success. But as the twentieth anniversary of the lightning strike approaches, strange things begin to
happen. Her four-year-old daughter goes missing and is "found" by a stranger who seems to have an agenda. Then a young woman appears who
is the spitting image of herself before the strike, who may even be a young Shelley. Is she having a breakdown? Is she being blackmailed? Is she
really living the life she wants? Part techno-thriller, part techno-satire, Cohen's debut is a funny, engaging read.--Diana Platt
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Platt, Diana. "The Glitch." Booklist, 15 Apr. 2018, p. 19. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537268043/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=943dd7cf. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537268043

QUOTED: "In Shelley Stone, Cohen has created an aggressively unlikable yet captivating and entertaining heroine."
"clever, original, and unabashedly silly fun."

Cohen, Elisabeth: THE GLITCH
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Cohen, Elisabeth THE GLITCH Doubleday (Adult Fiction) $26.95 5, 22 ISBN: 978-0-385-54278-4
A disturbingly ambitious woman finds herself challenged by mysterious crises--both personal and professional--in Cohen's painfully funny satire
of the tech industry.
In Shelley Stone, Cohen has created an aggressively unlikable yet captivating and entertaining heroine. Twenty years ago, as a directionless 20-
year-old, Shelley was struck by lightning, a trauma for which she claims to be grateful despite the physical pain it inflicted. She doesn't care that
the lightning shriveled her pleasure receptor or that she now scores low on the likability scale. What matters is that the lightning strike changed
her brain in ways that made her into the driven woman she's become. Shelley is married and has two children--readers will concur with her
amazement at having attracted financial-analyst husband Rafe, who goes along with her scheduled 12 minutes of daily sex even though his own
pleasure principle remains intact--but she's primarily committed to her role as CEO of Conch, a company producing personal data repositories
shaped like shells and worn behind users' ears. On a family vacation in France, Shelley's 4-year-old daughter, Nova, disappears while Shelley and
Rafe are distracted by work calls; more disturbing, both parents continue their calls while searching for her. Fortunately, a stranger finds Nova, a
stranger who somehow has Shelley's cellphone number and seems oddly excited to meet her when returning the child. Within weeks, Shelley
meets another stranger: Michelle looks like a younger version of Shelley herself, down to the same scar on her arm, and has experienced the same
childhood. Is a pre-lightning strike, alternate self possible? Or is Shelley having a nervous breakdown? Shelley is rattled but cynical enough to
have her doubts. Meanwhile Conch suddenly faces serious quality control issues that she must solve to save her job. And then there's Rafe's plan
to move with the kids to Brazil, with or without Shelley.
Clever, original, and unabashedly silly fun.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Cohen, Elisabeth: THE GLITCH." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650855/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7aca5102. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650855

• Bustle
  https://www.bustle.com/p/the-glitch-by-elisabeth-cohen-is-a-must-read-satire-about-the-tech-world-a-womans-place-in-it-9170715
  Word count: 1377

  QUOTED: "A wonderfully layered novel that blends humor, mystery, and social critique, The Glitch is a unique reading experience, one that at first presents itself as a kind of breezy women's fiction-style beach read only to later reveal its true satirical colors. A story that tackles everything from modern motherhood, the sexism women face in tech, and the conflicting ideas of perfection and happiness, Cohen's sharp debut is a funny and fiercely feminist appraisal of Silicon Valley and the pressure women face in a Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In kind of world."

  BySADIE TROMBETTA
  a month ago

  Ferris Bueller cautioned us in 1990 that, as the famous quote goes, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once and a while, you could miss it." Yet, almost 30 years later, it seems like we still haven't learned to heed his warning, and American life is even more demanding, even more fast-paced than it's ever been. What is it going to take to slow us down, to make us appreciate what is right in front of us, before it's too late? According to Elisabeth Cohen's novel, The Glitch, out now from Doubleday, the answer lies in our dopplegängers.

  Shelley Stone is the CEO of Conch, a wearable tech company whose behind-the-ear device helps its users do everything from play music, answer texts, and get directions to monitor vitals, stay on schedule, and work more efficiently. One of the hottest gadgets on the market, the Conch is perfect for someone like Shelley, whose Type A personality dominates everything in her personal and professional life.

  Shelley wasn't always the kind of woman who sets an alarm for 3:30 in the morning so she could have some "me time," or schedules sex with her husband. Before being struck by lightning on the front porch of her family's Wisconsin home, she was an aimless 20-year-old with little to no real ambition. After the accident, she was utterly transformed, and years later, credits the electricity for giving her drive and rewiring her brain in a way that helps her effectively balance her roles as high-powered tech executive, an industry leader, and a married mother of two. It's one of the reasons her TED Talks are so popular.

  As Shelley explains early on in the novel:

  “Women hold the CEO job at less than five percent in Fortune 500 companies, and that rate only climbs slightly — I think it’s five-point-one percent — when you expand that to the Fortune 1000. Women have around sixteen percent of the director’s seats in corporate America. Ten percent of companies have no women directors at all. Surely there’s something here that has given me this ability. Everyone sitting in the audience takes it on faith that it does, that the shot of electricity and the resulting agony were what it took for me to get here. Or that I am special, chosen in some way, which is why when that beam of lightning came down, it jumped from the sycamore to me.”

  Who cares if it seems like her pleasure receptors are offline, or that the new her is considered "unlikeable" by any standard definition? Certainly not Shelley.

  Or at least, she didn't, until a series of strange events leads her to question everything about herself and her carefully plotted life. First, in France on a family vacation, her four-year-old daughter Nova disappears while she and her husband, Rafe, are too preoccupied on separate business phone calls to notice. When a strange man calls to let Shelley know he has her child, she is immediately suspicious of the circumstances: Did the man kidnap Nova as part of some kind of dastardly plan to ruin her or her business, or is he just a good samaritan who helped her family reunite?

  Then, weeks later, she has a second, even more bizarre encounter with Michelle, a younger woman who shares the same name, appearance, and even she same scars as Shelley. The only real difference between to two is that the down-to-earth Michelle has a sense of calm Shelley hasn't known for decades. Unsure if the girl is her pre-lightning strike 20-year-old self, a mental breakdown brought on by stress, or her rival's attempt at corporate espionage, Shelley is determined to uncover Michelle's true identity. That is, if she has time. Not only is Shelley dealing with the fact that a younger version of herself has possibly materialized, but after Conch's new product malfunctions in a major way, the stressed out CEO has to work overtime to protect her company and save her own job.

  The Glitch by Elisabeth Cohen, $24, Amazon

  A wonderfully layered novel that blends humor, mystery, and social critique, The Glitch is a unique reading experience, one that at first presents itself as a kind of breezy women's fiction-style beach read only to later reveal its true satirical colors. A story that tackles everything from modern motherhood, the sexism women face in tech, and the conflicting ideas of perfection and happiness, Cohen's sharp debut is a funny and fiercely feminist appraisal of Silicon Valley and the pressure women face in a Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In kind of world.

  Through the first person narration, readers are given a chance to explore Shelley's thoughts. Not only is the book's heroine driven and determined in her work, but she strives to be efficient in everything she does, including her health, her family, and her sex life. That's why she takes men's multivitamins. “Why would I take vitamins for women?,” she asks. “Because I want less of what’s important, fewer nutrients and minerals? I refuse to conspire in my own oppression.”

  It's also why, according to Shelley, she relates to Kirsten Dunst's character from Bring It On: "because someone has to show leadership and make it happen when chaos is breaking loose, and the movie is truthful about the hardships associated with that." Shelley also loves the cheer sequences in the film, but that is a something she only shares as an afterthought, because like in most other areas of her life, she has no time for pleasure, even in her movie viewing. More accurately, she has no need for it. "We live expensively but it's all about our work," she says of her and Rafe's lifestyle. "Not pleasure — pleasure is not something I have much time for, the politeness of it, the inefficiency and excess."

  Like Shelley's own husband does throughout the book, readers will question whether or not this heroine is happy, or capable of happiness, given her overscheduled lifestyle, excruciating attention to detail, and constant drive for innovation and improvement. To someone like Shelley, though, it is those very things that bring her joy, or something close to it. Without the possibility of progress, she would likely argue, what's the point?

  Take her sex life with her husband. Even when she describes her husband's erection, it's in business-like terms. "I like the moment when the penis swells and comes uncapped," Shelley observes. "It appeals to my interest in tracking progress through measurable results.”

  Just when she starts to seem like a caricature of a real person and readers start to question her thoughts or actions — like when she asks Rafe how his phone call went as they search the French streets for their missing daughter — Shelley acknowledges her own absurdity and offers up a justification that feels genuinely believable in the context of a life like hers. "You might think, how could I ask that at a time like this? But it was hard to know what to do, it was my reflex, and Rafe and I talked always about work," she explains. "It was a self-leveling sealant that coated every surface of our lives, and seeped into the cracks and fissures of every moment. It was our hello, goodbye, how are you, I love you.”

  A sharp and clever debut that looks like a beach read and acts like a outrageously fun satire, The Glitch is a must-read for anyone struggling under the pressures of the modern, tech-heavy world.

• Pasatiempo
  http://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/books/the-glitch-by-elisabeth-cohen/article_aef82514-cd3d-5e2f-bb45-7e7a03362ffb.html
  Word count: 632

  The Glitch" by Elisabeth Cohen
  Grace Parazzoli Jun 8, 2018 (0)

  The Glitch
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  Doubleday, 354 pages

  “Analog technology” is how Shelley Stone might describe the print version of the novel she narrates, The Glitch, by Elisabeth Cohen. She might be okay with the e-book, though she would probably prefer the audiobook. If only it had haptics.

  Shelley is the sleep-deprived, excessively scheduled, Type A++ CEO of the Silicon Valley wearables company Conch, which produces a small device that, when placed just behind the ear, tells you everything you ever wanted to know. It covers the now-basics we’ve grown accustomed to checking on our smartphones — GPS, the weather — but it also gets more involved in your life, asking you questions (“Going for a drive?”), letting you know whom you’re speaking with (“Say hello to Shelley Stone”), and using vibration patterns to check in with you. “Our vision for the product is that someday it will be an assistant and a better self, all rolled into one,” Shelley says. “It’s an amazing way to optimize your experience in the world,” she explains; she is a self-described “digital evangelist.”

  The problem is that when we lean too heavily on another entity, be it sentient or digital, our decision-making can get a little shaky. (Do you use a maps app, and if so, can you still remember how to get places on your own?) “Not having to make decisions is very satisfying,” a Conch customer service rep notes during a discussion of some troubling reports about Conch users. They’re taking their “actionable” guidance a bit too literally, and some Conches seem to be going off-script, or rather, off-code.

  The novel’s titular glitch may be the Conch product peculiarities, or it may be something else entirely. Shortly after giving a motivational speech to women entrepreneurs in Barcelona, Shelley runs into a young woman who looks curiously recognizable. The woman, Michelle (Shelley’s given name), resembles Shelley 20 years prior, and she knows things from Shelley’s past that no one else could. She sleeps frequently and eats carbs.

  The plot of uncontrollable forces striking the most orderly among us is nothing new; neither is Silicon Valley satire. (Nor, for that matter, is Silicon Valley’s seeming self-satire — remember that $400 juicer startup?) That doesn’t make either any less smart and surprising in Cohen’s debut novel, which mordantly bites the tech that newsfeeds us. Sure, there are some obvious shots at easy targets: venture capitalist nerd-bros, marketing yoginis, everyone in tech who uses language like “decisionable” and “incentivize the millennials.” Shelley herself could be an easy target. In the novel’s opening scene, while on theoretical vacation with her husband and two young children in France, she stays on a call, even though her daughter Nova — as in “innovate” — has gone missing.

  But instead, she is a nuanced character, with a psychology that is both remote to those of us who don’t think of children as having motherboards or partnerships as having compression algorithms — and, somewhat remarkably, accessible. There are roots to her intensity, most notably a lightning strike half her life ago, which she credits for her reinvention from aimless Wisconsin kid to Silicon Valley boss: Michelle Stone 2.0. Reinvention is another plot point that can’t be said to be original, but when mixed with a possible younger avatar and video technology that shows Shelley doing things she’s never done, the result is certainly a unique AI Age kind of identity crisis. How she handles it is a joy to discover. She, unlike the Conch wearers who unthinkingly do as they’re told, is in control.