As a longtime journalist (and a parenting columnist for The Cut), Amil Niazi has made a career of being the person you turn to for advice on balancing kids, work, relationships, and all the other facets of a busy life. What’s so appealing about her new memoir, Life After Ambition, though, is its absolute avoidance of prescription.
Niazi is refreshingly candid about how miserable she was, trying to do things the “right” way for most of her life—an existence she’s traded for something more relaxed and less career-centric since the COVID pandemic. Yet Life After Ambition offers no tidy conclusions; 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.
Here, Niazi speaks to Vogue about embracing the concept of “enough,” what she hopes her three children will take away from her work, revisiting her own childhood in writing, and more.
Vogue: I know this is sort of the point of your book, but…how did you find time to write Life After Ambition while juggling your job and three kids?
Amil Niazi: It was not easy! When I told my agent, “Oh, by the way, I’m pregnant,” and she was like, “Well, when are you gonna write the book?” And I was like, “I’ll just write while I’m pregnant.” Yeah…no. I was so sick and nauseous and vomiting and exhausted, but I really did write in between naps, the school day, in the evening. I had about a month and a half of power writing, where my husband was on paternity leave, and he just would take all three kids out for five hours a day and I’d power through.
What separates toxic ambition, for you, from the simple act of wanting something and trying to get it?
That’s a good question. For me, the kind of ambition that had always powered me was a kind of relentless, never-ending quest for more. It wasn’t goal-oriented, it was just: “Keep going, keep pushing forward, nose to the grindstone.” No promotion was ever good enough, no raise was ever good enough. I just always felt like it was morally correct, as an ambitious person, to never settle, regardless of how good the thing you had was. For me now, ambition can be a tool to get somewhere, to get something, to move towards something, but there is a finish line—whereas before there wasn’t.
Is there anything you’ve used to replace your old framework for achievement?
I’m using the idea of enough for myself. Can I be satisfied? Can I be sated? Is there a point at which I’ve gotten the thing and I’m now going to enjoy it? That’s not really something that I’ve ever been comfortable doing, or ever even really known how to do, so I’m kind of still figuring that out. But I do think that right now, I have enough, and it feels really good, and I am so excited to just enjoy it. That doesn’t mean that I have stopped having desire, but I think I’m a little bit more focused about it.
What surprised you most about the process of writing this book?
I had this expectation, especially in writing about my childhood, that I was so removed from a lot of those feelings that it would be really easy and straightforward to write about them. But of all the heavy things that I get into in the book, it was actually writing about my childhood that affected me the most and made me the most emotional and sort of gave me the hardest time. It’s all three decades ago, but it just kind of goes to show you how much that part of us lives on the surface. As a parent, I get to kind of relive that part of me very often, but writing the book forced me to go much deeper into those feelings and those hurts and those joys in a very profound way that really took me by surprise.
Your writing about parenting during the pandemic is so vivid; do you think you would have reached the point of moving past ambition for ambition’s sake if the world hadn’t shut down?
I was on that trajectory, but I do think COVID probably sped up those thoughts, because I couldn’t escape the kids. I had none of those familiar outlets that I would have used to de-stress or to distract myself. I was sort of forced to reckon with everything on a much tighter schedule in a much more intense way. It was almost like being in an escape room, where you just had to kind of figure everything out very, very quickly for yourself, because there was no hiding. I wasn’t having cocktails at two o’clock every day or ordering a ton of Amazon; I was just barely surviving. For me, it was like: if I don’t make a change in my life, I don’t know if I can survive living like this.
I love how you make your kids present in your writing, while still respecting their privacy. What message would you most like them to learn from your work?
I hope that they take away that work is just one of many aspects of your life; that it can be fun, it can be exciting, it can get you places, it can buy you things, but that it is also just one piece of the pie, and you need to have a lot of variety in your life in order to feel whole. I don’t ever want them to feel like work is the only thing that Mom does or Dad does. I don’t want it to be their whole identity; I try never to say, “I am a writer.” I try and say, “I write, but I am many things.” That’s a lesson that I didn’t learn until I was an adult.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
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