Enter the Ambition Fatigue

“Fuck ambition.” That’s Elisa Albert, the novelist and short story writer and editor; the line might have been muttered, though, by many of the women who are making their way through the present American moment. Ambition, by now, was supposed to be easier. Ambition was supposed to be the great gift handed down to the women of today through the work of Stanton and Steinem and Pankhurst and Parks—the freedom to want, the permission to strive. The faith in the communion between the self and the world that has also been referred to, in other contexts, as the American dream.

Here’s what happened when the fiction writer and memoirist Robin Romm first reached out to Albert and other writers, asking them to contribute essays to her new collection, : Many of the women—writers and professors and athletes and doctors and lawyers, successes all—responded that they’d be happy to participate. Several of them, however, followed up by