-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
A "Good Enough" Memoir
by Amil Niazi
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, Losing My 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, Losing My 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.
"Niazi's storytelling is perceptive and relatable, beautifully drawing connections between her individual experience and systems of oppression... Overall a powerful and generous work. A warm, vulnerable memoir about trading ambition for sincerity and joy." —Kirkus Reviews
"Niazi's Millennial peers will relate to her realization of the never-arriving payoff of working one's way up in a so-called meritocracy, and to her terror at bringing children into a world they've been told is ending their whole lives, yet doing it anyway."
—Booklist
"With sly humor and piercing clarity, Life After Ambition dissects what it means to be a millennial burnt out on the cult of optimization. Niazi has written the rare memoir that manages to be both a gut-punch and a balm, giving us permission to imagine a future beyond modernity's plague of the scarcely human desperation to 'succeed.' As a 'good enough'-curious millennial myself, this book found me at the perfect time." —Amanda Montell, New York Times bestselling author of Wordslut, Cultish, and The Age of Magical Overthinking
"While the title of Amil Niazi's book suggests she's given up on ambition, I would argue that Life After Ambition offers an incredibly moving and expansive vision for what life might look like if we allowed ourselves to be grander, bolder, and more alive than we ever thought possible. A graceful memoir not of abolishing ambition but of evolving it toward something more authentic and profound." —Rachel Yoder, author of Night Bitch
This information about Life After Ambition was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Amil Niazi is a writer and producer. She writes The Cut's series on parenting, The Hard Part, and covers work and motherhood and how the two intersect. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post.
If you liked Life After Ambition, try these:
by Souvankham Thammavongsa
Published 2021
Spare, unsentimental, and distilled to riveting essentials, these "emotionally devastating" stories honor the surreal, funny, and often wrenching realities of trying to build a life far from home (Sheila Heti).
by Sue Monk Kidd
Published 2021
An extraordinary story set in the first century about a woman who finds her voice and her destiny, from the celebrated number one New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings.
by Meg Wolitzer
Published 2019
An electric, multilayered novel about ambition, power, friendship, and mentorship, and the romantic ideals we all follow deep into adulthood, not just about who we want to be with, but who we want to be
A few books well chosen, and well made use of, will be more profitable than a great confused Alexandrian library.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
