Life After Ambition
A "Good Enough" Memoir
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER. Channeling the subversive and sharp-eyed voice showcased in her popular column for The Cut, this memoir stylishly interrogates the aspirations of young adulthood, early middle age, motherhood and life after ambition— for readers of Ada Calhoun, Jia Tolentino, Jessi Klein, and Maggie Smith.
Building off her wildly popular viral essays “Losing My Ambition” and “The Mindfuck of Mid-Life,” rising star 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 they intersect 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?
Life After Ambition is 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. Niazi has written a book that is, at its core, about optimism, about the joy of choosing something different, and about the thrill of finding ourselves when we thought all was lost. A whip-smart reimagination of how to live our lives, Life After Ambition will set the stage for rising star Amil Niazi for many years (and books) to come.
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.
