The Glitch by Elisabeth Cohen

I’m going to talk to you today about a book that so irritated me as I was reading it that I almost stopped several times, and I did put it aside for for a couple of days while I read another book. It is a 2018 novel by Elizabeth Cohen, The Glitch, and upon completion I think it one of the funniest books I’ve read all year. 

Shelly Stone is the CEO of a very successful company called Conch, and I can say that she is one of the least likable characters I have ever met. The conch is a very small device that fits just behind the ear, and is in fact a high power computer that can do a multitude of tasks. Shelly says of herself that stress is the airstream in which she flies. She has a husband and two children, but they are laughably incidental to her real life, which is work. In an early passage of the book where Shelly is with Rafa, her husband, in a restaurant, a rose in a vase has the audacity to sag to one side. She tries to adjust it, but it doesn’t work. “I tried to pretend it didn’t bother me,…But I could tell he knew it annoyed my; that’s one of the problems of marriage, the ability to read the truth off each other’s faces. It obviates all the effort you make to hide how you really feel”.

Shelly is only happy when she is at work, but she takes the entire search for happiness to be misguided.

Rafael is a bit pleasure driven…Pleasure doesn’t hold the same pleasure for me. I get bored and irritable. It takes so long, an appetizer’s enough for me to feel like I’ve had the experience at the restaurant, and lying down for five minutes is  enough of a nap, and I like to schedule sex for when we’re changing our clothes anyway. Then I need to get back to work…pleasure is not something I have much time for, the pointlessness of it, the inefficiency and excess.

While in Barcelona to give an inspirational speech to a group of successful women, her conch seems to exhibit a glitch. For one thing, it identifies a young woman who is approaching her as Shelly Stone, and this initiates a wonderfully absurd sequence of events as she tries to determine if the young woman is, in fact, a younger version of herself. Another client in told by his conch to jump off a cliff, and he does as told. Just as they are about to launch a new model, they have to try to deal with this glitch. That part of the story is complicated and in most ways tangential to the main theme of the novel, which I take to be the incredibly high price women have to pay to enter into the highest power positions in corporations. But while that is (I believe) the serious undercurrent of the novel, it is the wildly funny descriptions of the monomania of Shelly that kept this reader’s interest. Rather than trying to paraphrase some of these sections, I think I will quote some passages that will do a better job of conveying the humor.

An interviewer asks Shelly, “Wow, so you get up at 3:30 every morning?”

It’s true, you have to be disciplined to lead this kind of life. Discipline is so important. I’m a grateful hostage to my routines and my checklists. But the truth is, and I’m going to give it to you straight, that when anxiety is ripping is ripping our insides to pieces, it is actually a lot easier to get out of bed than to lie there wanting to die. I can’t sleep—it’s not that I don’t want to. But I need the time, so it all works out. Anxiety has replaced caffeine for me…I’m always; asking myself, how can I fit in a little more work: What else can go, so there’s more time to work? Just because it’s 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. our time doesn’t mean things aren’t really rocking in the Malay production facility, so I check in with some of our vendors and retailers. Making that time count allows me to squeeze in a shower, because it’s important to take time for yourself. While I’m in the shower I brainstorm solutions to work problems. Then I get out. I have towels I get from a special place in London, extra soaky. I have a system for drying myself in a quarter of the time.

What’s your secret to balancing it all? 

If I had to laser in on my most key pieces of advice, I would say surround yourself with good help, pick a good spouse (which is basically the same thing), offload everything that is not core, and don’t lose minutes. 

Shelly thinks of herself as a good and capable mother, but reading some of her parenting ideas will surely convince readers otherwise. 

Every day I feel such pride and purpose as I walk into Conch. If I’m not at work, I’m thinking about work, so it’s satisfying when my mind and surroundings sync.

Shelly’s Q score, which measures likability, tops out in the single digits. But she wonders why she is not more likable; she likes herself. “Still, a more likable CEO might help Conch at the margins, and I felt I had in me the potential, even obligation, to become an averagely likable person."

The reader discovers that Shelly was struck by lightning as a teenager, and while suffering through a long and painful recovery, she reckons that the strike made her into the successful overachiever she need to be to run a large corporation. 

I happen to love Mondays—they are my most productive day and my favorite (thank God it’s Monday, I always think when I wake up). It’s not that I dread the weekends per se; I love them differently, like a second child. On Saturday mornings, I feel, despite my efforts, a little down at the prospect of temporarily unplugging, and although I never really do, entirely, there’s something depressing about pinging out emails and knowing it could be an hour or more before anyone replies. The workweek at Conch is joy, so it’s a nice feeling to have as much of it as possible still to come. 

From reading the acknowledgement at the end of the book, it’s obvious Cohen has done her homework re women in high power positions and the toll it takes, and I have to admit once I realized that she is intentionally caricaturing life of a successful CEO, I found the humor of the book more compelling. Shelly says she prioritizes Conch and her children, and wonders if, perhaps, she should have prioritized her marriage more. But "How many things can be the priority? Really just one at a time". ‘Priority’ is not a word that can legitimately be pluralized. And Rafa understands, or I thought he did. He has his own work. Of all of them—Conch, Cullen, kids, Rafa—he needs me the least.

You will have to read the book to discover more about the glitch and about the juggling act of Shelly.

Heat Lightning by Leah Hager Cohen

I want to talk to this morning about a book entitled Heat Lightning, by Leah Hager Cohen. It is another of those amazing first novels, though the author of this one is already an established writer of non-fiction. Like so many of the novels I seem drawn to these days, this is a novel about coming of age, about the peculiar tension between adults and children, and about a profound sort of loss that we tend not to take seriously enough.

There are two girls in this story, one eleven and the other thirteen, united not only because they are sisters, but also because their parents died by drowning when the girls were still infants. The story they are told of the drowning is so brief, so devoid of detail, that the girls are left to fill in the story—in comedian Lily Tomlin’s words, the girls are left to make up the truth, and the story they quilt together is theirs alone. They add to it in bits and pieces, changing, improving, reshaping, but once agreed to, their strict adherence to the story in all its details is a continual test of their loyalty and their private world.

In addition to the brief description they have been told, they also have a cookie tin containing twelve faded photos. This tin they only open ceremoniously, reverently, when they are alone together. The older sister’s name is Tilly, the younger referred to always simply as Mole, and the kind woman who raises these girls as if they were her own is named Hy. It is she who gives them the brief description they have, and it is her silence that allows, even forces them, to embellish the story as they choose. When, occasionally, some new detail falls from Hy’s lips, the girls pounce on it, always disappointed not to get more.

Such details fell randomly and infrequently from her lips. Tilly and I were hoarders, jealously storing them, much as we did the particular shells and stones and bits of soft-edged glass we had been inspired to collect from the lake and keep on beds of cotton in old cardboard gift boxes: undisputed treasures whose usefulness, we felt certain, we had only to decipher. Here, Hy was no help. When milked for further details, she would only shrug and clamp her lips; when pressed she would say, ‘I don’t know, you have the cookie tin.

Best friends as well as sisters, the girls roam the lake and the countryside, sharing everything, but especially the carefully crafted story they have told of the death of their own parents.

For years, one of Tilly’s and my favorite games involved arranging these snapshots on her bedroom floor and making up stories and dialogue to animate the images, the way other children might have done with dolls. These twelve pictures afforded us such latitude in constructing an idea of our parents that we learned not to mind the paucity of Hy’s reminiscences; her story we appropriated as well, and privately embellished. Thus the storm, in my mind, comprised hail, gales of wind, thunder, and lightning. The sky was gray-green, the color of the place between yolk and albumen in a hard-boiled egg. The rowboat was red. Our parents wore rain slickers: hers yellow, his navy blue. They washed up on the sand clean and pale, their mouths and eyes closed, their fingers interlaced.

And so this simple and beautifully written novel begins. The first sign of trouble, of impending change and betrayal, is Tilly’s telling of parts of the story to a teenage boy who, along with his scientist parents and three younger siblings, has moved into an abandoned house on Hy’s property known to the girls only as the dead house. Worse than Tilly’s telling of the story to this boy, Walter, is the fact that, without permission, she alters the story in detail as she tells it, changes the sequence that she and Mole have agreed on. Mole hears the change, looking for a sign from her sister that this is conspiratorial, that it is still Mole and Tilly against the world, still their story, only theirs. Perhaps the change in the story is simply a slip, a genuine forgetting on Tilly’s part, but there is also the strange new behavior—an affected lisp that has creeped into Tilly’s speech, a new attention to her body, a new insistence on privacy inside the house. How is Mole to understand these changes, this breech in their union.

For my sister—well, more than just her consonants were in flux that summer. She was by turns irritable and serene, radiant and remote. Within minutes she could alter, even her features, which behaved somehow out of synch with her moods; one moment she’d look stern and lovely, the next cheerful and angular, almost homely. She seemed to shimmer, slightly, as if two selves lay superimposed one over the other: a familiar thin shadow over a paler, emergent form. Now I have access to words I didn’t then: ‘menarche,’ ‘hormones,’ ‘pubescence.’ That summer I thought it was all the Rouens {the family in the dead house}, that their presence was bringing about a change in Tilly, in us, in our lives; that collectively they made a kind of key, unlocking us.

I think we tend to underestimate the profundity of love between children, and consequently to underestimate the betrayals, the intensity of the pain and loss that children can suffer. Not long after Mole hears Tilly begin to change “their” story, to alter it without permission (just as she alters her speech and mannerisms), she comes to understand also that Walter and Tilly no longer want her hanging around with them, no longer treat her as one of them, but, instead, treat her as one of the younger children. For the first time in her life, Mole is alone—not planning out her days with her sister as she has always done, leaving the house together, coming home hungry and sun-burned and tired together, conspiring and playing and loving together. And she is utterly unequipped to handle this new form of loneliness. She feels confused more than abandoned, an unexplainable sadness and sense of loss though she cannot really even blame her sister for it. Tilly and Mole have always noticed the difference between adults and children, have always felt a vague combination of sympathy and contempt for adults whose lives seem shallow and whose conversations seem false and strained.

The grown-ups ... talked the way grown-ups do, managing to render every subject odd and distant. The most ordinary subjects grew bloated and complex in their mouths, phrases and pauses measured in a manner at once formal and abbreviated, like Morse code.

And Tilly had explained carefully to Mole how adults simply tend to “go off”, how sometimes even Hy would “go off”, acting distant and strange. But until this fateful summer, Mole could always count on Tilly, count on the camaraderie of Tilly against the adult world, and now even Tilly is “going off”. It is unthinkable that Tilly has gone over to the other side, that she will become as uninteresting and dull as other adults.

I had the terrible thought that all grown-ups were gone off, partly or wholly, but all of the time. You might think you were having a conversation with them; you might think they understood the things you said, and they you understood them in turn, but in fact it was an illusion. You could remember their exact words, even write them down on recipe cards, but later when you checked, they would say you had misunderstood. They would say they and forgotten. And now Tilly, too.

Poor Mole has no way of understanding the concomitant loneliness and rage that begin to develop in her—no way to explain her desire to break something, to cause harm. She mopes around the house alone, snooping as she has always done without guilt.

Their secrets, Tilly’s and Hy’s, even their—not secrets, but things, trappings, personal effects—I felt were in some way details of my own life, to which I was entitled. As if locked inside their private artifacts lay information about me.

But the snooping now has an edge; she is looking for something, something that will justify her rage, explain her ineffable loneliness. She rejects Hy’s shy attempts to comfort her, and along with the loneliness that she is drowning in, she also begins to experience a new, almost terrifying sense of power and freedom.

I am making this story seem more ominous than it is, more complex and tumultuous. It is really simply the story of two children who are on the cusp of womanhood, but with one just those two important years older. And while the separation in their lives is inevitable, in some ways even good for both of them, it is also incredibly sad—the rendering of a seamless love. What is remarkable about this book to me is the way in which Cohen can so completely and yet simply express the love between the sisters. How she can remember (or construct?) these meticulous details of childhood, can remember so clearly the sense of adults keeping things from children, lying by omission, as if the children will not detect the careful misrepresentation and make more of it than had they simply known the truth. Perhaps it is only my indulging in my own childhood memories, loving the chance to again (for a few hours) have a child-eye view of the world. I think this is a lovely book, one that you will love to read and that you will come away from feeling enlightened, lifted, though you may have trouble saying why.

This is a wonderful book to start your summer reading.