245. Avoiding the Need to Make Memoir Prescriptive featuring Amil Niazi

And now a word from our friends at Pro's Playground. This June 10th, Pro's Playground welcomes Anlamot and Neil Allen for a free community-wide in conversation. On May 18th, the 10 Spreadsheets event will give you everything you need to know to launch your book. To join both events for free, visit prosplayground.com and sign up today. Welcome to Let's Talk Memoir, a podcast for memoir lovers, readers and writers. I'm your host, Ronit Plank. Let's Talk Memoir is also a substack newsletter. About once a month, I publish memoir-crafted vise, answer questions about memoir writing, and share my latest classes and upcoming events. You can go to substack.com and subscribe to Let's Talk Memoir for free. You can also find me, Ronit, on Instagram and on Blue Sky. Today, my guest is Emil Niazi, who is a writer and producer. She writes the cut series on parenting, the hard part, and covers work in motherhood and how the two intersect. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian and The Washington Post. Her new book is Life After Ambition, A Good Enough Memoir. Welcome, Emil. Thank you so much for having me, Ronit. Oh, thank you so much for being here. And I would love to begin by having you share just a bit about your new memoir Life After Ambition. It's a bit of a journey through my life, starting from childhood and sort of how work and ambition and money and class and outside earnest, I guess, if that's a word, being an immigrant. And how all of these things affected my life and then more into adulthood, young adulthood, and sort of the clawing search for a place on the latter of success. And the sum of the difficulties in achieving that success, some of the realities of the workplace that I encountered as a woman of color, and then how work, motherhood, and ambition all collide and what happens of those three things. You know, it's not prescriptive at all. It's very much, here is my life, here are some of my failures and some of my successes. And I hope the book pushes people to ask themselves, what do I desire, what drives me, and am I really doing what I want my life? Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. It makes me wonder, you said it's not at all prescriptive. And I'm wondering when you were writing the memoir or when you started to query it, when you got a publishing contract, if the perspective, if the way you approached the story, changed it all or if you felt pressure from any outside forces to make it prescriptive. It changed a lot from the pitch in the sense that initially I had conceived of it as separate essays about all of these things, like more in line with sort of my writing at the cut. So obviously that's column length, so taking that and expanding it into these longer essays that had an arc, but were disconnected. And then in the process of writing it, I realized that the book that I would have wanted to read when I was like 20, 30, 40 was much closer to what I ended up writing, which is like the journey of a life within those spheres of like work and motherhood and growing up as an immigrant or growing up with no money. I think those are very relatable things and I think that that's my strength as a writer. It's why the column connects with so many people is my writing's very personal, but it also connects to these larger issues that people are facing. And so I really felt like the right approach for the book was something again very personal. At some point there was a question of well how are we going to land book? What do we want people to come away from it with? And of course I think with a book like this, there could be pressure to make it prescriptive, to say like, "You're five things, you know, you can do as a working mother to disconnect your life from ambition." But that just felt so wrong to me. And there was never any pressure to do that. In fact, I think they really liked the fact that it wasn't prescriptive and it wasn't a self-help book, that it really was something that anyone I think can jump into and relate to. If you have no kids, there's lots of men that have read the book and told me they really loved and connected to it. So I think that you achieve that when you are as a memoirist, very vulnerable and very open and very personal. So yeah, I agree with that. And it's interesting too because there's so much in the discussion these days about memoir plus, which can also include research and journalism and interviews where we have to take our story and sort of pan outward and incorporate so many other voices. And so I really appreciate that while your manuscript changed from what you're saying, you were able to hold on to the core of the manuscript's vision, which was it's your story. Yes, yes. No, I really agree with that. I think that there is this, I don't know if it's pressure or insistence or this idea that the personal isn't enough. But when I spoke with agents or even with publishers, it's like, well, where's the journalism? Who are you going to talk to? And it's like, oh my god, I'm going to talk to. I'm right about myself. This is what I do. Yeah. Well, I'm so glad you were able to sell it because in the climate, it just seems sometimes you hear as a memoirist, in the memoir community, oh, memoirs so hard to sell blah, blah, blah. And I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying you waved a magic wand. It's very nice to know that you ended up with a book that stuck to what you envisioned originally. Yeah. No, thank you. Yeah. It's a bleak environment to sell any book these days. But I think particularly a memoir when you're not a famous actress or you're not a millionaire. You're right, of course, but you have this column in the cut, which is not a small thing. And to think that someone like you would also have to be concerned with how am I going to sell this. And I don't know if that's what you're saying. But that really just puts a spotlight. It shines a light on exactly how challenging it can be for even if you're not a celebrity, even if you're not a columnist in a well-known and well-loved paper. If you're not someone who has a giant platform, but we can find ways to get our books in the world. So I think it's important to normalize how hard it can feel sometimes. And you write that growing up, you felt that you had to be ambitious. And I pulled this quote out, your only chance to escape the poverty and trauma that it shaped my own childhood. I knew if I wanted security and stability and comfort, I had to work harder, be smarter and strive in the most active sense to change my circumstances. And I'm wondering if you could talk about the pressure this created in you at a young age. Yeah, I mean, already I think something I've still come to a lot of people about after the book has come out is like, there are so much pressure on children of immigrants. It's almost like they came here for us, right? That's always the narrative. I don't know if you can relate to this, but my parents came to this country, they had no money, they had no family here, and they often told us I have two sisters that they came here for us, for us to have a better life, for us to have a chance to not be forced into marriage or forced into a life without education, without opportunity to better ourselves. And so that's an ingrained pressure from day one is like, you need to justify the fact that your parents fled everything that they knew their language, their culture, their family, their food. They gave all of that up so that we could have something better. And so there's already that pressure, right, that I'm up against that many, many people can relate to. And then on top of that is, yeah, this reality of our financial circumstance, and my parents weren't educated here, so they're starting from zero and they're working the jobs that many new immigrants work, you know, driving taxis and my dad had so many jobs, you know, selling cars, driving taxis. But you know, it was always actually quite fun for us because we got to experience all these different wild things with him. But then so there was the pressure to also to be able to provide a stable life, not just for myself, but the family that I hope to have someday. And so I really clung to ambition as this necessary tool as a survival mechanism. I was talking to Madeline Doni-Hew who made the beautiful illustration on the cover about this and she grew up similarly. And we were both saying that ambition really, when you grow up with no money, it becomes all about survival. It's like someone tosses you one of those flotation devices when you're drowning. And you hold on to it because it's kind of the only way for you to get out of that water. And I always got very good grades. I was excelled academically. And so then there was another pressure on top of that as well, which is my parents saw that I was doing well. My teacher saw that I was doing well. And so I had this constant voice to live up to your potential. You could do anything as long as you apply yourself. I just, I got it from all sides, particularly elder millennials, millennials. My generation can relate to that. You know, that's my personal story. But generationally, we've been called the Gold Star Generation because there was always this ongoing idea that we had to live up to the expectations that our parents had of us, the reward was the American dream. Do all this stuff and you'll have a house, you will have a nice car, you'll have a big family and you'll be able to do what you love and get paid for it. What a fallacy that turned out to be. Right, that there's this formula and if something doesn't work out in the formula, it's on your shoulders that it didn't work out. And also, I wonder what it's like to constantly be steeping in this broth of gratitude. You have to feel grateful, you have to feel that what you have is an opportunity that you can't squander, you know, whether it's from the country that you've moved to or your family or the people you work for, the people whose identity is different from yours that sense of obligatory gratitude. You might grow up with it and then at some point think, well, I'm just exhausted from being so grateful all the time. Yeah. Well, you talk about your first steps, you started in journalism, young and I'm curious, you've been in the field for a long time now. What do you recognize now about yourself and your experience in those early jobs, even maybe before you realized, oh, I'm going to make a career of this? Yeah, I think what has been the through line for me in my career, I get asked occasionally to speak to young journalists at J schools about, you know, my career trajectory and realized two things that I've always been able to do and that have served me very well and allowed me to last in the industry when it can be quite punishing and demoralizing is one, my tenacity. I never gave up. When one door closed, I was ready to knock on the next door and if this newspaper wouldn't have me, then I'm going to try this one and that one and if none of those work out, I'm going to make my own. And so that's something that I never gave up and I consistently looked for opportunities and networked and made sure that I was able to say that I tried and exhausted every single opportunity and so that has served me very well and that's very clear from the very beginning, you know, I was 15 years old writing for it was quite cool. It was like a newspaper targeted to teens and it was called you think, yeah, it was a teenager and I got this and I had already known that I loved writing and I wanted to be a writer and of course already was so naval gazing. I was like, I'm going to write about myself in my opinions, but I pitched them constantly because I knew already in that moment, like this is a chance, this is an outlet, this is where I might be heard and that's all I wanted it was to be heard and to be recognized for my work and so the other thing is my ability and my willingness to do anything, just to say yes to anything and to try new things and to use it all as a learning lesson. I'm just gaining experience. Yes, I'm busing at this horrible bar, but I'm learning XYZ. Yes, I'm scooping poop at this talk show as an intern, but I'm learning something and I can see when I tell the story of my career to younger journalists, I'm so proud of myself to be able to say, like, I've worked in print, I've worked in digital, I've worked in radio, I've worked in television, I can write, I can produce, I can host, I can do everything and I can jump into most positions, even though I've been away for a while because I was willing to try new things and to take on new things and to say yes to things. That's something that maybe is getting harder, I think, for young people to do because the foot in the door jobs are disappearing and sometimes people my age competing for those jobs because they're trying to get back into an industry or they're changing jobs, changing industries. But I think if you're willing to say yes and you're also tenacious, that is something that has carried me through layoffs and collapsing companies and shifting visions for what journalism is going to be pivot to video, pivot to podcast, pivot back to video. It's all about digital, it's all about this, it's like it's hard to keep up, but if you're willing to say, okay, yes, let's try it, let's do podcast, let's do a newsletter. As long as you're open and willing to do it, the worst that happens is that you picked up a new skill. Yeah, yeah, tenacious and agile, right? Yeah, yeah, it's interesting because I wonder how it plays out now that you are shifting your lens on what ambition means, but I do have this quote that I pulled about your 20s when you said that you were a dissolution but still eager to prove yourself and you talk about how your ambition and desire for a certain kind of success collided with your relationships. And I have this paragraph which was quote, I was seen as somehow Craven or a sellout for not only knowing what I wanted to do, but actually doing it. Men were condescending about how much effort I was putting in to get work, but if I got the job, they were quick to remind me that I only got it because of my identity. They made sure I knew I didn't deserve any of it, that even though they didn't want what I had, if they did want it, they could certainly have it. I was loathe some for wanting success and then mocked for getting it. I made myself smaller to correct the imbalance, their behavior suggested was there, but no matter how much I shrank, I still ended up paying a price for how much a room I took up. I learned to change my desires, the way I talked and the way I dressed. And I convinced myself that the further I climbed, the easier it would get, and eventually this would all be worth it. So, Amiel, when did you get clarity about these dynamics and what was it like to revisit them for this memoir? I took a year long time to realize kind of like what was happening. Obviously in the moment they felt like now we have a word for it, we call it a microaggression, but in the moment I just remember feeling bruised and a little bit shamed when men peers, friends, people in my social circle, people at work, yeah, would make these dismissive remarks about my desire to be someone and to be something out in the world. But also if I got a job, they were, you know, very quick to say, well, you know, you just got that because they don't hire white people anymore. People have said some pretty crazy things to me, but it was in my 30s actually, I had a decade of experience behind me. I knew how capable and talented and intelligent I was, and I had more confidence about that, a little bit less the imposter syndrome that I carried through my 20s. And I could finally look back and see what was happening there and how misogyny and the patriarchy are always interested in tearing women down. And whether you choose not to work or if you choose to work, they find a way to dismiss you and dismiss your desires and belittle you and mock you and yeah, essentially make you feel small. And what it did for me in my 30s once I sort of realized that dynamic was frankly to make me work harder and to make me want to take up more space. And I think it did wonders for me. I was working at a media company. I was working at Vice and my 30s and then I remember looking around and seeing very few women in leadership roles, very few women that could mentor us and talking to my female colleagues about some of the people in charge and some of the decisions that were being made and the way that we were being treated. And it inspired us to start a group called Women at Vice that organized and came together and worked to make the environment better for women, not just for ourselves but for the people that would come after us, the company imploded. So it didn't really work out in the legacy type of way. But I just remember feeling very suddenly invigorated and inspired to make a change in my 30s once I could really see what was being done and why it was being done. And I no longer would tolerate that. And especially in relationships, I think one of the reasons I spoke about some of my intimate relationships in the book is because I really wanted to show how, first of all, work intersects with every part of your life and how our relationships impact who we are at work and how we move through that space. And the relationship I speak about in particular, that was someone who was very threatened by my ambition, very threatened by my focus and my ability to achieve success and very interested in making me shrink myself. And I think that that's another thing that I really put together in my 30s is like, this isn't just me at work, this is me in every facet of my life and my desire to have more is something that will always be questioned and interrogated and potentially destroyed by the wrong person. It also really changed who I dated essentially. It's like, okay, I will no longer be in a relationship where my desire to succeed is seen as a negative and seen as something that is threatening to their identity. And you know, there's this excerpt I pulled out that begins on page 129 if you feel like reading it now and you can set it up if you want and just kind of place us in time and your age. Yeah, so this was shortly after I'd had my first child, I was in my mid 30s working at vice and feeling both very, very excited because I had gone through IVF and tried for many years to have this baby in And so I was just overjoyed and thrilled and so looking forward to the next chapter of my life. But at the same time, I had gotten so far in my career and I was also very excited about what was happening there for me. But then, simultaneously, really concerned about what would happen when or if I came back to this job as I was going on parental leave, what would that look like, how would I be treated as a mother in a company that was so focused on youth and that youth identity? And would I be disparaged or isolated? So there was a lot of concern about what happens to mothers in the workplace once they have a child and just feeling a lot of anxiety in that moment. So that's where I am is I've given birth to Somerset and now I am suddenly overcome with this fear about who I am and who I will be if I go back to work. Even as I gave myself to Somer, I started to access a part of myself I'd long buried. Being so entwined with someone in this way, someone so vulnerable and reliant on me, gave me new insight into the sacrifices we make to survive, how short and complicated life really is. I still felt like me, but sharper and softer at the same time. For the first time in a long time, I felt compelled to write again, the urge to create felt overwhelming. In my darker moments though, thoughts of my actual job bubbled up. In January, the company announced a sizable round of layoffs that would eliminate key roles in the editorial department. I spent hours looking up how vulnerable I was because despite all the assurances about my job before I left, I knew that when it came down to it, this company like any corporation would and could discard you if it made sense for their bottom line. I'd never bought into all the talk in the office about work as a family. Family doesn't fire you unseremoniously on a Friday morning, cutting off your email access before you've even had time to make it back to your desk from HR. Family doesn't force you into litigation over a severance package. They're dragging their heels on because their debts ballooned beyond their control while their CEO bought another mansion. I made myself sick worrying about whether being laid off would impact my parental leave payments and Matt agonize over the safety of his own job. Even if I didn't lose my position in this round of layoffs, it became clear that the forces behind these cuts would have a long term impact. The writing was on the wall. Even if I wanted to go back, what would I be going back to? I'd really entered my peak earning years that I had to make sure this precarious situation wasn't as good as it gets. Hearing about the layoffs, a friend and former coworker reached out from the UK. She'd been working at a broadcaster there for almost a year and she knew how anxious I was to find something more secure. Would you ever move to London, she asked. There was a role opening up in the commissioning department and she could put in a good word. Matt and I both had dual British citizenship and it had always been a dream of mine to work for the broadcaster. The only hiccup was the three-month-old infant who so desperately needed me, who I was nursing as I chatted to my friend about what the job entailed. Even so, I didn't think there was any harm in applying. Sometimes just the act of putting myself out there helped to recalibrate what I wanted and what kind of work I was really looking for. I sent in my CV and cover letter and then sank back down into the piles of milk-stained swaddles and dirty diapers surrounding me and returned to the puffy hands of the newborn so desperate for my body and time. A week later, I got an email to book an interview. Thank you so much. Thank you. And I have this quote from just maybe ten or twelve pages later. I asked to work from home on Fridays so I could stay home with S one day a week. On days I had little work, it was lovely. When I had to take care of a toddler and answer emails and take calls from my boss, it was like my brain was on fire. I felt in those moments that I was deeply failing at both conceits. And I feel like this is such a familiar feeling for mothers. I mean, it's kind of the air we breathe and I'm wondering where you've landed with this now. Yes, I think that that's one of the most relatable parts of the book for sure. Something that the women talk to me about all the time. It's that feeling of like, I can't do both of these things at the same time, but I'm being asked to do that all the time. And pretend that I don't do either of these things, right? You have to pretend you're not working at home and you have to pretend you don't have a child at work and you're just sort of collapsed in the middle there. Where I've landed now is that I realized I couldn't do both at the same time. And I had to figure out a way to take more control of my time. And for me, that looks like freelancing and taking myself out of a traditional nine to five because it just doesn't work. There's a new book coming up called yesterday year about tradwives. And I think so much the tradwife movement is a reaction to the reality of what it means to be a working mother. It's a bad reaction, more power to everyone to choose what they want to do with their lives. But I don't think that we're grassing into a place where women are no longer seeking employment or seeking success in that sphere. That's not where we want to go necessarily, but we have to look at the reality of what working parents go through what it means to have the school schedule be one way and the work schedule be another and then to try and fit those together. And I sort of had to take myself out of that because I couldn't have the family that I want to have if I was doing that I couldn't have three children, right? I think that's why so many women, so many families choose now to be one and done or I think a lot of people would have a bigger family if they had more time, if they had more flexibility at work, if they were able to have more control over where and when they worked. But unfortunately we are still in this capitalist system and so we do what we can, but for me to get out of that feeling to stop feeling like my brain was on fire, I was sometimes it felt like I was juggling chainsaws that were also on fire. And everything's on fire when you're working parent in order to stop feeling like that I had to take myself out of the traditional in office role. And I think what's interesting is shortly after that, of course, was the pandemic, the COVID pandemic and the height of lockdowns and everyone sort of experienced in some capacity, what it was like to have to erase the boundary between your work and your personal time, right? We were being asked now to almost work around the clock just because we were at home. And I think for parents, especially it was such a wake up call for how destructive and deranged our working lives and our home lives had become because we were now being asked to do both of those things in one space. And I think it really, really shook a lot of parents to the core. And it's why I got a column in the cut because I was writing about that experience and so many people were saying like yes, I am feeling the same thing I'm going the same thing was very, very difficult to parent and work through the pandemic. And so what is sad to me is there was this moment, this opportunity to see that and to give people more flexibility in their work and to see what a difference that would make in your home life. But instead of moving forward with that approach, we've gone right back to everybody needs to be in the office. Everyone's back to commuting, everyone's back to like figuring out child care before care after care day care. It's baffling, it's frustrating when you put it that way and when you kind of encapsulated that way, it sounds actually crazy making right to no win at all. And I'm actually curious about this. So you had this job at the cut, you have these three children, you have this memoir. And when I was writing my memoir, I was in graduate school. I had younger children and I was also teaching but not full time. So I would stay up late, late, late to write my memoir when everyone had gone to bed. That's what I did. And I'm wondering how you carved the time out that you needed to write this memoir and did doing so feel any different from the time you preserve for your journalism work. Did you allocate time differently because it was your memoir. Did you feel like it had to go on the back burner because you had to do your journalism first. How did you get the book written? I am very, very lucky that my husband Matt, he was able to take three months of parental leave when the baby was about five, six months. We had timed it so that he could be off. The baby would be of an age where you know, we could have him out for longer without breastfeeding and for those like three months, he would take the kids out. So we're the summer. So you take the kids out for the day and then I would write and I just knew that I had X amount of time and I just had to get it done and to naiously, dog idly, wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. And then we went to Portugal for a couple of weeks and my dream was to like finish before we left. So I didn't have to think about it. But of course I did bring my laptop with me. I wrote on holiday, but it was nice. I was writing in like beautiful surroundings. But yeah, I just wrote when I could essentially naps newborn sleep a lot luckily. Maybe your newborn sleep a lot. My newborns. During the day, during the day, I remember when people would say that they had good sleepers for kids and I was just like, wow, we just did not have that luck with either of ours. I'm not bad at mulling my kids kids. I just am just sharing. Yeah, you get what you get right. Yeah. Yeah, my kids now sleep very well, the older two in their own room. and you can just sort of put him to bed and they'll go to sleep, but my toddler for sure, he's like, he does have his own room and he'll sleep the first part of the night there, but then he wakes up and then he just comes in our bed and that's real good. - It's really, it's just so cute. I have a 20 year old now and an 18 year old and so I don't wanna say all those, cliché things, but they're so huge now and they used to be so little. - Yeah, well I'm about to ask you what books you wanna recommend, but before I do that, and I know I'm keeping you a little bit long, I just wanna ask you when you think about finishing the manuscript and sending it off to your editor, what do you feel like you can pull out as some of the bigger changes they wanted? What was maybe an overarching edit you needed to make or something that you felt like, oh, they really wanna see more of this. Not like the micro things, but on a macro level, do you recall narrative arc wise or structure wise? Was there something that they were asking for that they needed to see more of? - The first pass, it was almost like I had put sort of the shell of the story down, especially in the middle, you know, when I get into some of the tensions at work when I'm in my 20s, 30s, my relationship, the assault that occurred and those chapters, I think the first pass, it was very difficult for me to get those down in a way that was more vulnerable and in depth. It was almost like I had to just like write the shell of it at first. We talked a lot about where those chapters should go, whether it should start the book, if it should be in the middle. And I wonder sometimes if we should have moved things around a little bit, but I had to take a second pass particularly for the middle parts and put in a lot more detail and be a lot more vulnerable and a lot clearer, I think. But it was hard, it's hard to revisit the whole parts of your life. I don't know if you had this when you were writing, but there were definitely days where I would finish and then I would just cry and it just came out of me at the end of revisiting something and it just would like come out. - I don't wanna say the other genres don't experience this, but when I teach memoir, we spend the whole class on managing trauma and self-care and one of their assignments is to think about what are the signals in your body that you might be getting overwhelmed and what can you do to mitigate that and what kinds of resources and supports can you put in place because it's such a personal intimate experience to go back over the things we encountered that traumatized us where we wanted to fight, fight, fawn or freeze and then we couldn't, we didn't have agency and now when we go back, we have to craft it. Who wants to slow down time into a scene and revisit that stuff in slow motion? Nobody, that's why I often don't wanna get into a scene until later because it's just too much for me. That's the juxtaposition, we have to get the pages out and finish the book, but we also have to take care of ourselves and be in tune with what we need and when we need to take a break. So yeah, I totally understand, writing a section, getting shivers, crying, things like that, absolutely. Yeah, memoir is its whole own thing, it's whole universe. Well, thank you for sharing that and what are a couple of books that informs your writing process you wanna recommend? - It's so cliche, but it's really the truth. Joan Diddy and Slauching towards Bethlehem, that was such a formative book for me. The first time I read it, I was in my early 20s. I was in Europe on this trip, there was lots of trains, there were lots of buses and I remember reading it, chapter by chapter, essay by essay throughout that whole trip and just feeling so inspired and moved and invigorated by the way she saw the world and how singular her voice is, how clearly she's able to capture the perspective that she has about the world. And I think that's the most important thing in memoir writing is it's not necessarily about connecting the dots for people about the larger impact of your story, it's about offering people a perspective that is uniquely yours and letting them connect to it, however they do and it's often surprising what people find in your work, but that's something that I've always taken away from her writing, it's just focus on what it is about the world that drives and inspires you and find a way to make that so clear in your writing. Because that's what makes memoir so special, right? It's like, I think we long to know each other and we long to know what it's like to be you, what it's like to be that person who lives across the street from me, you know, like I often would love to immerse myself in that space. I can't remember there's a German word for it, I think. Wish I knew it, but I'm sure the Germans have a word for it. But it's like, you know, that feeling when you, I don't know if you've ever had this, but I remember as a kid, we'd be driving the car and I'd be staring out at like all the houses on the highway and thinking, I'll never know the people in there. But I long to, I long to know everyone in the world. There is a special German word for that, I think that feeling of wanting to know about other people's lives and sort of staring into windows in that way. And so I think that that's what so magical about this type of writing is like, you really get to embody another person's life and that's such a gift. So that's a very important book to me. And in fact, I'd lost that copy. I ended up giving it to a boy, of course. - Oh, that's great. - But this one, from my life for, yes, something like 15 years now. And I just got it back and it's so dog-eared and it's falling apart, but I hope that my kids will read that copy and be inspired by her as well one day. And another more recent book, I happened to have access to while I was writing is Claudia Day's daughter. And while it is fiction, it is very clearly almost like a fictionalized memoir. - Does it feel like a fiction? - It feels like auto-fiction. It's very clearly a window into her life story. The writing process really shines through in the book. Well, I happen to know her and I know that for her, she basically went away to a cabin. And this is kind of what all writers dream of. She'd be on a wait for like two weeks. It came to her and she just wrote. And that's very obvious and evident in the story. It's like the writing is very frenetic, but it's almost like one giant beautiful sentence. And that was very inspiring to me as I wrote to. Because even in fiction, you have opportunities to again give people a perspective into your life. That can be very exciting too, as a reader, I think to get a little bit of both worlds. So that's another great book that I feel is special and so uniquely in the voice of that author. And that can be hard to do, you know? I think sometimes you don't find your voice until the second or third book, who knows? The book almost needed to come out of me so that I could write something else. It's almost like I had to get this out of the way so that I could write something new. And that's also very exciting as a memoirist. It's like you have many stories to tell, but you often have to get something out to realize that. And so I am excited to write something else. Because this is to find you, right? The story and this vantage point has really defined you. Well, I guess I want to ask you before I ask you to share links about where people can find you. Do you have any last words of advice you kind of just gave it? But I always ask everyone what advice they want to share with writers working on their memoirs. My advice would be to push yourself past the point of comfort. And that's not to say, you know, give more of yourself than you want to. I think you also do have to hold some stuff back. It's very important to preserve parts of you that are intimate and sacred. And you certainly should never have to feel like you're exploiting yourself or your trauma in order to write a memoir. But at the same time, like I mentioned about writing the shell first and then having to go deeper, it's like, I think in order to truly get your perspective out into the world, you do have to push yourself a little bit past what you're comfortable with. Because that is where often the magic is. It's like, what is it that you really want to say to the world? And don't be afraid and don't live in that shame. There are a lot of things that I was like, oh, should I share this? But I realized I was just holding onto shame and putting it out there allowed me to free myself of that. I was like, I don't need to be ashamed of this. I don't need to hide that this is how I grew up or this is what I faced. And but in order to get all of that in there, I had to really go, you know what, I mean, this is where you're comfortable. And this is where you kind of need to be. And it's a little bit past what you think you can say. Thank you so much. That resonates with me a lot. Where can people connect with your work and find you and get a copy of life after ambition? And I'm going to put all these links in the show notes. Well, you can follow me on Instagram. It's @amielniazi. It's my first name and my last name. I'm also on threads. So where people are these days, and it's the same thing, connect to my Instagram. And you can buy the book anywhere. It's at all the big bookstores, I believe, but you know, if you have a great local bookstore, you can support. I'm always all about that. And then of course, it's online at Amazon. And I really hope that people will buy a copy because it's hard out there. I know it is. I'm going to put all that information plus the books you recommended in the show notes. And I want to thank you so much for your generosity today and allowing me to ask you a gazillion questions and for really reflecting on them with such vulnerability and detail. I really appreciate it. No, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure talking to you about this. Thank you for listening to Let's Talk Memoir. For more about my story and the project that started me on my memoir Loving Path, you can check out my memoir when she comes back. which is available wherever books are sold and as an audiobook that I narrated. For more about this episode and my guest, please visit the links in the show notes. You can also find a complete catalog of Let's Talk Memoir episodes at runetplank.com/Let'sTalkMemoir. Let's Talk Memoir is also on Substack. About once a month I publish Memoir Craft Advice, additional interviews, and upcoming classes that I'm offering. There's no paywall. If you are a fan of Let's Talk Memoir, please feel free to share it with your friends. And if you feel moved to leave a podcast rating and review, I appreciate it very much. That helps more writers and readers find the show. Thank you so much for being here.