Kleeman studied creative writing and cognitive science at Brown University, and received an MFA from Columbia University in 2012.

No shit.

Maybe I'm unfair. Maybe it's just that I just read the not-entirely-dissimilar but far superior My Year of Rest and Relaxation the other day, but YDCHABLM does indeed feel more like a writing exercise than an actual novel, and not an entirely successful one either. There are good ideas in here - a society based on empty calories both in food, self-awareness and relationships, applied gnosticism, a sort of Pynchon-lite absurdism with both fake TV commercials and secret societies etc - but overall, it doesn't work. The novel feels just as super- and artificial as the society it tries to satirize.