The “Female Ambition Memoir” and Women Who Want

"The funeral for 'trickle-down feminism,' eerily, keeps repeating itself."

“The funeral for ‘trickle-down feminism,’ eerily, keeps repeating itself.” — Sophie Lewis, Enemy Feminisms

There’s a nonfiction genre that I’ve privately¹ come to think of as the “female ambition memoir.” These books exist on a spectrum from explicit self-help to unadulterated personal narrative, each acting like a cultural temperature check of women who want. The category has mutated alongside our faith and disillusionment, beginning with its deliriously optimistic ur-text: Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money, Even If You’re Starting With Nothing (1982) by Helen Gurley Brown.

In recent years, the genre trended in a decidedly less motivational direction, with a series of anti-aspiration “burnout memoirs” like A Year of Nothing (2023), All the Gold Stars (2023), Ambition Monster (2024), and Life After Ambition (2026), books by women who organized their lives around success and lived to tell the tale. The latest in this “ambition-to-burnout” category is Lena Dunham’s mesmerizing Famesick, in which Dunham regales us with the aftermath of being eaten alive for her moxie almost as soon as she became highly visible because of it.

Repurposing my collage from this issue, where I covered a Bloomberg article about this trend.

Observing this pattern from my vantage point as the target reader for these titles, it struck me as reflective of a broader shift in the zeitgeist: one that saw us becoming more fluent in the language of structural barriers and collective solutions precisely as our policymakers were demonstrating an almost impressive lack of interest in either.

The very same day Famesick appeared on shelves, so too did entrepreneur Emma Grede’s new book Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Life & Work. As the title might suggest, Grede’s book is a hairpin turn from the broader trend and has become, maybe as a result, a medical-grade discourse magnet. In it, she braids her life story with her business philosophy. The book’s dizzying press tour, which delivered her from Oprah to Good Morning America with a stop at every big podcast in between, made her a fresh talisman of stunningly unambiguous female drive (the “three-hour mum” soundbite a perfect example), a concept that feels both dated and, somehow, dissident.

What followed was a Sandbergian twilight zone, an exhaustingly familiar call-and-response about leaning in and falling behind, about white feminism and intersectionality, about individual solutions and systemic problems. That this frequently seems to be the endpoint of discussions about women’s ambition in particular strikes me as noteworthy. “Woman who wants power and money” often codes first and foremost as “girlboss” (misguided, debunked, naïve), rather than merely “capitalist,” a rational if un-comrade-like response to the incentives of our global economic system.

For centuries, women have been considered the innately moral rearguard of society, a premise that hums, barely audibly, beneath the “women and work” discourse. In Anne Summers’s Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975), Summers describes how women in Australia were cast into one of her two titular archetypes. As “God’s police,” they were treated as “guardians,” those responsible for “civilizing” society and curbing the worst impulses of men. Corporatized echoes of this logic appear in well-meaning calls for more women in leadership, when conversations veer into assurances that the second sex naturally wields power more benevolently—that they will, in a word, civilize the workplace.² “Few who call for more women in power as a demand of justice can resist adding some promissory note,” Lorna Finlayson writes for The Boston Review, “about the therapeutic effects that a woman’s touch might bring.” Grede, on the other hand, said on the record that she wrote this book for no such tender purpose: It’s “for ambitious women who want power, money, [and] careers.”

The original “female ambition memoir”?

Start With Yourself inspired such an inescapable maelstrom in my corner of the internet that I knew if I was going to wade into its rhetorical fray, I needed to read the entirety of the text in question.³ While there’s always an obvious scalability problem that plagues any advice about how to succeed inside complex, unfair hierarchies,⁴ Grede possesses such an intoxicating rags-to-riches mythos that it’s easy to forget her exceptionality proves the rule.

Her story of besting adversity is straightforwardly compelling. She describes growing up in Plaistow, an East London neighborhood “where people stole the wheels off cars,” and where she was raised by a single, working mother who left home at dawn and came home after dark. She reflects on being a stand-in parent for her younger sisters as a kid, packing lunches and taking them to and from school. When packages would fall off the garment trucks that rolled down her street, she resold the merchandise to teachers at recess. She began working when she was 12 and dropped out of school by 16 (she has a learning disability), a period of time when she lived on a friend’s couch. When she became the top salesperson at a department store (despite being both a teenager and working there only two days per week), she realized she may not have been book-smart, but she was talented. In the fashion workrooms where she later found herself, she describes being acutely aware of the ways in which she was aberrant: the only Black girl, the only poor girl, the only girl without a fancy education. Her attitude about her circumstances, at least in retrospect, is enviously upbeat and resilient. She recalls loving the hustle and grind of work easily and immediately, writing, “I intuitively understood that I had outsized ambition.” This is, unmistakably, a woman who wants.

In the responses to the media tour that populated my feed following the book’s publication (specifically, responses to soundbites about work-from-home being a “career killer for women”), a few data points appeared over and over again, like that return-to-office mandates disadvantage⁵ working mothers, or flexible work is especially important for people with disabilities. Equally common was an understandable, ambient irritation surrounding the publication of another advice book written by a person who is now excessively well-resourced. I can sum up the collective response in two words: This again?

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This essay is continued after a message from this issue’s sponsor…

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It would be predictable to use this flashpoint as an opportunity to lecture you about the toxicity of hustle culture, and then patiently recite my cherished talking points about paid parental leave, universal childcare, and, depending on how radical we’re feeling, seizing the means of production. It would be understandable for me to tell you that, as one of the “richest self-made women⁶ in the United States,” Grede could instead “use her platform” to disassemble the ladder rather than personally climbing it. But like the female ambition genre itself, this analysis no longer feels as though it’s breaking new ground—on the contrary, we’re now painfully aware of what needs to change, but see no sign whatsoever that such a change is imminent, or even, at this particular political moment, possible.

The resulting morass is one of circular arguments and shouting past one another into a seemingly endless void. We’re struggling through a post-coup power vacuum, our old #bossbabe toppled but her replacement figurehead nowhere to be found. We exist now in the gap between widespread recognition of what needs to change and the change itself, where we are aware of structural shortcomings but still forced to live inside them. This is an intensely frustrating position, a frustration that permeates both “sides” of the ambition/anti-ambition conversation. While the average 30-year-old woman may recognize much of her anxiety about being a working mother is a byproduct of structural failure and social conditioning, this awareness does little to improve her reality, where she must confront that anxiety anew every morning when her alarm goes off and commit to a plan for the day despite it.

Each component part of the miasmic critique is perfectly legitimate, but it’s been accumulating into something that lands uneasily. It was only in allowing myself to be sandblasted by the discourse for the last week that I noticed how these conversations have a tendency to pathologize ambition itself.⁷ An individual desire for achievement is often discussed like it exists in diametric opposition to systemic change, as though the presence of the former is antithetical to a desire for the latter. But expansive personal flourishing is arguably the point of pursuing collective solutions; to enable personal flourishing for more people, more fully.

Discussions of structural and institutional barriers tend to call to mind faceless and impersonal forces; those that exist in the halls of Congress or Fortune 500 boardrooms (return-to-office policies, a lack of public transit, family leave). This can obfuscate forces much closer to home. In the midst of my reflection over the last few days, I read a perspective from a career coach that stopped me in my tracks: The most common obstacle she observes her clients face, she says, is not the formal structure or rules of their workplace, but their partners, who are, more often than not, simply unwilling to make any “material and practical adjustments” to support their goals, a pervasive and unspoken attitude about whose passion and drive are assumed worthy of organizing a life around, and whose are not. This is the ground I fear we cede when our wanting is treated as suspect; as individualist, futile, and worst of all, “girlbossy.” Each discursive step from “Leaning In is not the answer” to “work itself is the problem” to “domestic social reproduction alone is natural” has been shorter than the last.⁸

Regardless of where the “female ambition memoir” genre heads next, I still have yet to encounter a self-help business book written by a man that results in a conversation about the legitimacy of advice that does not prioritize flexible schedules and universal childcare. The implicit assumption is that it’s not their problem to solve.

1. Until right now, I suppose

2. In a 2015 reflection about her framework for the Guardian, Summers asks astutely: “Are flexible work places all about making it easier for women—not men—to juggle kids and jobs?”

3. Yes, my Saturday nights are fun

4. This is, by the way, a criticism of the business and self-help genres which would remain even if all structural barriers to equity disappeared tomorrow

5. There’s an undeniable class element to this conversation that seems underexplored, as the majority of jobs that can be performed remotely are not in the service sector where women tend to be overrepresented in low-wage or dead-end work

6. This 2025 Forbes list places Grede at #88 but the Little Caesars maven at spot #3, which for some reason tickled me so totally that I had to take a writing break. Big Pizza Memoir when?

7. While researching, I jotted down certain phrases and words that seemed to appear over and over again in articles, comments sections, and videos. I’ve decided not to link specific pieces of media, because I don’t want to give the impression of responding to any one perspective or person, though I know it undermines my point to not provide specific examples. You’ll just have to trust me! Hope it resonates! Sorry!

8. A single-minded drive channeled toward making as much money as possible is certainly not “natural,” of course, though it’s “a product of a long and arduous process of education” for everyone, as Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism, not just women