I am always impressed when people write memoirs like Ambition Monster that make them out to be horrible people. It’s an interesting kind of honesty. Sure she is calling herself a “monster” but clearly it is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. I think she came by her personality naturally because her family, particularly her mother, sounded like a trainwreck. A lot of the stories this book are difficult to read and get feeling that you are getting the whole story. I would love to read a memoir written by her husband, friend, coworker, or family member and see how they saw these events.

I felt like this memoir was somehow both overly detailed and missing some real basic information and depth. That sounds impossible to pull off but she does!

For a book that is about her ambition, I really never felt like she was that ambitious. She kept moving up and bouncing from job to job working bonkers hours but it was never clear that she actually was ambitious. She never seemed to like her jobs very much or want to even do them, much less move up.

It felt like she was compulsively working without any goal beyond being employed. There was an oddly passive feeling about her work. I never felt like she was passionate or ambitious about any of her jobs which is odd for a book about workplace ambition. She just worked and worked.

I can see why she would want to avoid being around a husband she barely seems to be able to tolerate and holds in contempt which would explain some of why she spent so much time working despite an apparent lack of interest in what her job actually entailed or producer or later in her career, being a manager.

Part of it might be that she seems to have a fear of poverty but admits she and her husband never think to save any money at all no matter how successful and well paid she is which an interesting choice. They both came across as incredibly immature. At least she managed to stay employed most of the time and that kept a roof over their heads during their many impulsive moves, travels, and career switches.

Most of the book listed her jobs and what she hated about them and how many hours she worked but I never felt like we got any depth to why she did any of it. Despite all the details of her messy personal life, I never got a good feeling of why she stayed in her marriage, why she had a child or even what exactly did she do outside of working hours day to day.

It is bold to admit you and your sporadically employed husband both neglected your child’s basic needs for eight years despite countless professionals saying he needed help for years and then move on from that little tidbit in about a page.

I did appreciate some of the class issues she talked about—how her fellow employees who were born wealthy were so demanding of the staff at the cafeteria and dirty in the facilities. That is not something I see in books often but I’ve found to be true in real life.

The book was also hard to read as she sounded like she was miserable all the time and frankly, stayed that way until the end of the book.