Against ambition

We should all stop making lists to prove our worth

When I was in grad school, I worked nights in a bookstore. Many writers would come in and paw through the books. The store was near the UC Berkeley campus, and in those days, you might see Czeslaw Milosz, Ishmael Reed or Maxine Hong Kingston, just picking their way through piles. But there was one author whose name I can’t recall, a frizzy-grey-haired, middle-aged, very North Berkeley kind of woman. Affluent, comfortable Boomers are a dime a dozen on the hilly side of campus, but she’d published a few novels and settled into her routine, walking her miniature dachshund in her Eileen Fisher matching sets.

For a period of time, she’d come into the bookstore nearly every day and greet one of my bosses, asking “did you hear about my Guggenheim?” Dreary Monday. “Did you hear about my Guggenheim?” Busy Saturday. “Did you hear about my Guggenheim?” Unbearable Friday. “Did you hear about my Guggenheim?” She must be dead by now, or very, very old. Is she still writing books? I don’t know. I just googled “North Berkeley woman novelist miniature dachshund guggenheim” and the top result, somehow, was the Black poet Yusef Komunyakaa, who also came into the bookstore, with his much younger wife.

“Did you hear about my Guggenheim” is something I’ve thought about ever since. I was maybe 25 at that point, hungry both literally and figuratively, ambitious and champing at the bit to make my way into the literary world. But it would take nearly fifteen years after that to publish a book, then I’d spend a decade and a half working like hell to write and publish as much as possible, terrified of slowing down and being forgotten by my editors.

Women, I was told, should stop being ashamed of their ambition. A writer I used to be friendlyish with when I cared what people thought on social media has made this her entire brand, “New York Times Bestseller” coming before her name in every bio, her newsletters telling all of us to forget what other people need and focus on ourselves and our ambitions, because people just need to get out of the way.

But whatever ambition I had as a writer came to a crashing end in September of 2023 when I was diagnosed with cancer. Yes, my editors forgot about me. No, my most recent book isn’t on anyone’s best of year end lists. No, it didn’t win any awards. Yes, I’m reading everyone’s “here’s what I published this year” lists with a chip on my shoulder, the one that doesn’t move correctly any more since my diseased breasts were removed.

A California redwood tree regrowing after fire. Image via Forbes.

My students are disdainful of “girlboss feminism.” With their increasing distrust in institutions and the collapse of the social ladders that used to lead to success, to them, success isn’t necessarily winning awards or earning titles – it’s being able to afford to move out of your parents’ house, or having the luxury of free time to write.

The literary world has always offered the same myth of a meritocracy as the rest of the American dream, the notion that if you work hard enough on your craft as a writer, eventually the world will recognize your genius. But that’s never been true. The masthead of the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic – they’re full of Ivy Leaguers. There are 255 MFA programs in America and only five major book publishers. The math, as they say, is stacked against ambition.

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey, the protagonist, Whitman Ah Sing – a broke UC Berkeley English graduate who fancies himself a playwright – takes a job stocking shelves in a department store toy section. His coworker is an older, silent type of guy, but eventually Whitman learns that his coworker is the former Yale Younger Poet.

The promises made to anyone who wins that kind of award – yes, even poets – are tremendous. The actuality of most of those who win it is far more pedestrian. I have taught at UC Berkeley for a long, long time, and have seen many best selling novelists, award winning poets, internationally produced playwrights come and go, Berkeley just a rung on a ladder that theoretically goes up. But far, far more often, it goes down into the basement of the department store where a Yale Younger Poet is stocking shelves.

So what I’m saying here isn’t to stop telling everyone about your Guggenheim or your New York Times Bestseller, but to remember that ambition only gets you so far. There is disease, yes, and it will make you rethink what it means to be driven by ambition. But there is also the need to make money, to take care of aging parents or growing children or dying pets, there is the need to have a soul and the cost of what it means to put ambition above it. Ambition should never come at the cost of our humanity. The thirst to be read should never come above the thirst to write. Social media shoves other people’s success down our throats until we’re choking on it. This is not how we were meant to live.

What I am saying is not that it is okay to fail, but that failure is going to happen and that your life still matters and still has meaning whether you published 75 essays this year or zero. Ultimately, your Guggenheim and your New York Times best sellers and your Substack checkmark and your CV and your lists of publications and your social media followers will not go with you into the grave. They will not offer any comfort in the chemo chair or in the dialysis clinic or in the surgical suite.

What will matter is how you lived your life.