AMBITION MONSTER: A Memoir, by Jennifer Romolini
This spring, the website LitHub published an essay about the lack of financial particulars in contemporary fiction. That piece stayed in my head as I read Jennifer Romolini’s spirited memoir about her transformation from an angry and self-destructive child of teen parents in working-class Philadelphia to a hard-charging fashion magazine editor and, later, a “Corporate Barbie” at a Fortune 500 tech company.
Although a work of nonfiction, the memoir, “Ambition Monster,” is at its most original when it grapples with the monetary calculations and status anxiety of a heroine who, unlike many denizens of the 21st-century mediascape, has neither a trust fund nor an Ivy League pedigree to fall back on.
Instead, pregnant, shotgun-married and a college dropout at age 21, the author seems poised to follow in the domestic footsteps of her mother. But a circuitous path leads her back to community college, then out of a stifling marriage. A collection of truly terrible boyfriends follows. Among them: a writer-musician who, unhappy about being broken up with, sends a photocopy of his middle finger, embellished with the words, “I now look at you as only a receptacle to put sperm.”
At a summer publishing course in her late 20s, Romolini makes the acquaintance of another world-class jerk: this one a “maverick” middle-aged publisher. Soon after, she washes up in New York City. There, she finds herself sharing his V.I.P. table at the nightclub Moomba, and, more generally, “submitting to sex not for pleasure but as an extension of my résumé, a gathering of useful information, a performance of independence, if not solely a means to numb out.”
It is ultimately through pavement pounding, not connections, that she lands her first editorial assistant job. But her ascent up the career ladder is slippery; after paying rent, Romolini has so little money left over that she resorts to making $3 rice and beans last two nights.
Even after landing a proper editor’s post, she discovers that she makes less than she did while waiting tables. Compelled to seek side gigs, she writes unlikely-to-win-a-Pulitzer features for Target’s in-house magazine with headlines like, “What’s Your Faucet Style?” Insecurities about her skill set and class background persist, exacerbated by the frequent experience of dating men with more success and fancier educations than her own.
But if the constant threat of precarity underscores her drive, Romolini makes the argument that it is actually childhood trauma — her early years were steeped in chaos and occasional violence — that accounts for her growing workaholism as she moves through her 30s and 40s. “Inside me is a hungry, terrified, security-craving goblin in the presence of whom I feel powerless; an ambitious monster who wants it all,” she writes.
Eventually, Romolini realizes her girlboss dreams and lands a C-suite job running the style pages of a legacy tech website. But even as she mocks the meaningless corporate lingo and “Hunger Games”-esque firings — “transitioned out” is the preferred dystopian terminology — her inability to put work away threatens to destroy her marriage.
Romolini’s honesty about her failings is laudable. Her propensity for overwork, however, is matched by a tendency to overwrite. We don’t, for instance, need to know that on Wednesday nights she and her future husband watch “Lost,” and a 26-page chapter on Romolini’s stint as a glorified caption writer at the shopping glossy Lucky might have been whittled by half.
She also packs on adjectives and clauses where just one or two would do. “In my work life, I am diligent, strategic, calculating, eyes on the prize; but after work I’m sloppy and not at all self-preserving; a pretend life-of-the-party girl, a girl who pretends she doesn’t care, the last person standing wherever I land,” reads one of countless prolix sentences.
However overstuffed, “Ambition Monster” offers an entertaining and highly relatable account of the struggle to avenge the people we once were. It also illuminates the empty promises of a life built on nothing but external metrics of achievement.
AMBITION MONSTER: A Memoir | By Jennifer Romolini | Atria | 304 pp. | $28.99
