A powerful book in a small package—especially if you’re a mom, add this to your reading list! Read on for my review.
The Summary
Channeling the subversive and sharp-eyed voice showcased in her popular column forThe 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 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.
My Review
Life After Ambition is a no-frills examination of motherhood, being a woman in the quagmire of corporate America, and trying to find some sort of balance between being a mom and having career ambition.
Amil grows up in a home where the basic necessities are sometimes close to out of reach as her parents live paycheck to paycheck. This kind of childhood makes her really long for more. She wants to get out of her city, out of her station in life, and away from her parents.
Although we never lacked for anything really as kids, I did grow up in a home where college wasn’t the norm. In fact, neither of my parents were college educated, and my older brother decided to try a 2-year degree. So, I was the first in my family to go to a traditional, 4-year college. It wasn’t easy.
Amil quickly finds out that life after college can be just as hardscrabble as life without going at all as she tries to find meaningful employment at various newspapers/content publishers. Eventually, she’s somewhat stable when she gets married and decides to have children.
When her first child arrives, she starts on a journey of self-discovery in terms of how she wants to balance being an ambition, career-driven woman with being a mom. She also parents through the pandemic:
The pandemic had already collapsed work and home, forcing the two together in a tangled knot, so there was no point pretending anymore that I wasn’t a parent at work, or a parent who works at home. I wasn’t a mother trying to “have it all,” I was just trying to do enough with what I had.”
Overall, I enjoyed Niazi’s writing and her insights. I did feel at times like she could go into more detail, but I also appreciated the compactness of the book. I’m giving this one 4 stars.
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More About Me
- Best Books of 2025: Our Favorite Reads of the Year - January 1, 2026
- Review: That’s a Great Question, I’d Love to Tell You by Elyse Myers - December 30, 2025
- Review: Life After Ambition by Amil Niazi - December 11, 2025