A memoir that grapples with changing ambitions and the myth of having it all.
Many millennials (or non-millenials, for that matter) will be familiar with the overarching plight of Amil Niazi’s Life After Ambition, her “good enough memoir”: the experience of being stuck in the rat race of chasing one dream after another, only to find yourself on a never-ending grind. In this race, there’s always one more goal to achieve—one more professional hurdle to overcome, one more career ambition to attain—before the dream can be realized. For women especially, relentlessly pursuing a profession, while ensuring all other aspects of your life are left unscathed, becomes an ever-shifting goalpost; the quintessential “having it all”.
As the book’s title implies, Niazi unfolds the futility of this chase, made especially futile given the instabilities accompanying her career of choice—journalism and writing. But the memoir is as much a personal unfolding as it is a professional one. In it, we learn of Niazi’s parents’ almost romcom-like origins before she disabuses the reader of the myth of their marriage and the prospect of an idyllic childhood. There are the anticipated working-class migrant struggles, the family never having quite enough, which takes them across oceans to seek a better life in England, where the author was born, and eventually, to Canada, where the author has spent most of her life. There’s also the abuse between her parents, which Niazi touches without ever quite expounding on, even as she informs of their eventual divorce and sketches her own experience of intimate partner abuse later in life.
In Niazi’s childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, there’s a persistent feeling of lack. There’s little romanticizing of her circumstances, and she admits her personal rat race was likely born from this instinct: Storytelling—reporting and writing—was the one endeavor that allowed her to make sense of the world. In distressing but humorous episodes, she depicts a life of underemployment before eventually landing a job that sets her on a viable career path. Amid all the instabilities, she moves from Vancouver to Toronto with a boyfriend who physically abuses her—and there, the violent ending of their final contact results in a hard-to-shake addiction to prescription drugs. Through all of this, Niazi continues to work, uncertain of who she can trust with the vulnerable parts of her life, but finding stability through her ambitions—learning along the way, her calculus won’t always pay off.
There are bright spots throughout Niazi’s ordeals, despite the numerous and varied difficulties. There is a dog she loves and cares for, friends who intervene, and a reliable boyfriend who eventually becomes her husband. Yet her career ambitions remain the driving force that shapes her life, until suddenly, it isn’t; and for Niazi, a large part of this shift happens when she becomes a mother. After a period in London—chosen, of course, for her career ambitions—she ultimately returns to Toronto with her family when she realizes those ambitions have changed.
Indeed, in the final analysis of Life After Ambition, I wonder if the author doesn’t slightly betray the title. She gains fresh perspective through her choice to pursue having a third child, and by attempting the kind of writing career she’s always longed for, one less defined by output, and instead, by balance. For her, motherhood and writing are intertwined and related; one aids the other, and though she must make sacrifices to have both, neither can be forfeited.
Perhaps less than delineating what life looks like after ambition fades and falters, what the author concludes is what becomes of us—especially of many women—when our ambitions include more than the careers we set out to have. In so doing, what Niazi offers in her debut book is not only a re-think of our lives as she unravels her own, but a re-defining of ambition entirely, demanding we consider the whole of our lives, and not just the parts we keep separate in the name of career.
