Life After Ambition
A "Good Enough" Memoir
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
“Refreshingly candid...Niazi is telling her story in medias res, inviting readers to figure the whole mess out with her—and in this era of gentle-parenting TikToks and general advice oversaturation, that feels like a gift.” —Emma Specter, Vogue
Channeling the subversive and sharp-eyed voice showcased in her popular column for The Cut, Amil Niazi stylishly interrogates the aspirations of young adulthood, early middle age, motherhood, and life after ambition.
Building off her wildly popular viral essays “Losing My Ambition” and “The Mindfuck of Mid-Life,” Amil Niazi explores what life looks like “post-ambition.” With sly humor and a deep literary sensibility, she interrogates her own evolving ambitions, and how it intersects with adulthood, motherhood, age, identity, class, and race, and how it has shaped her and a generation of millennials. And—most importantly—now that she is done with ambition: what happens next?
An achingly relatable, intensely funny punch to the gut which reveals that, though we hide them from one another, we all have the same painful bruises. At its core, Life After Ambition is about optimism—about the joy of choosing something different and the thrill of finding ourselves when we thought all was lost. A whip-smart reimagination of how to live our lives, Life After Ambition reclaims mediocrity to tell us that it is okay to NOT have ambitions but to try and live a life that is true to who we are.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this pert if slipshod debut, Canadian journalist Niazi unpacks the work ethic instilled in her by a Muslim immigrant childhood at the edge of poverty. Burdened by her parents' unhappy marriage, Niazi was raised with the immigrant refrain that the "sacrifices of home and family should spur in us... raw desire to succeed and better ourselves." Though she was pushed by her parents toward "the standard list of hoped-for occupations: doctor, lawyer, engineer," a high school internship with a youth-focused newspaper convinced Niazi that journalism was her path. Throughout college and young adulthood, she was torn between writing for an alt weekly that "paid me in free food and beer" and taking jobs that could earn her a living. The promise of stability came with a producing job at the CBC in Toronto, but a violent attack by an ex-boyfriend sent her spiraling into drug addiction. She then became sober, married a coworker, and navigated infertility and pregnancy, all the while wondering if ambition was the biggest obstacle to her happiness. Niazi's core ideas about hustle culture and the immigrant experience are plenty rich, but pedestrian prose and a pervading sense of solipsism prevent them from blossoming. It feels like a missed opportunity.
