There are the stories of our lives and then there are the lives we are actually living,” Jennifer Romolini writes in her deeply moving memoir, Ambition Monster. In it, Romolini untangles complicated knots many of us are grappling with in midlife: trauma-informed work addiction, chasing approval through professional achievement while conflating it with self-worth, and realizing that our public narratives and ideals of success can be starkly disconnected from our personal values and integrity.
This Q&A was adapted from the Alta Weekly Newsletter, delivered every Thursday. To keep reading, become an Alta Journal member for as little as $3 a month.
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Romolini is a Los Angeles–based writer and podcaster who’s held a multitude of high-level roles in both legacy publishing and digital content. In the book, she also delves into the complexity of shifting from her working-class childhood in Philadelphia to a creative-class adulthood on both media coasts.
Along her ascent up the LinkedIn ladder—from greasy waitress jobs to conference-room pitch decks—she experienced distinctly different eras of snooty corporate showboating and micro-generations of self-congratulatory female leadership.
Whether it’s the 2000s-era haute couture mean girls ruling Condé Nast, where she was the deputy editor of Lucky magazine, or, later, the millennial tech-world #girlbosses who faked it till they made it by prioritizing hashtags over hard skills, Ambition Monster unpacks it all with wry humor, surgical phrasing, and unwavering self-awareness.
We spoke over Zoom about survival jobs versus status jobs, girl power gone awry, and how California’s earnestness healed her after years of crushing/hustling/slaying in NYC.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I would love to talk about what happens when you leave the service industry and enter the ideas industry. You start out in restaurants and retail. And then you’re on the masthead at Condé Nast.
With this book, I really wanted to write about class. We’re all affected by class, but we don’t talk about class. What happens when you make a class transition? When work goes from being just “a means to an end” to having a career, and being in a different world with people who grew up in a very different way?
There was a profound loneliness for me. I had no context for any of it. And I really expected things to be more of a meritocracy, because in working-class life, things are more of a meritocracy. Like in waitressing—with your tables, if you are a good server, you make more money.
Right. People running Condé Nast never married ketchups at 1 in the morning.
They’ve never married ketchups at 1 in the morning! They’ve never cleaned around a toilet because the busboy couldn’t do it. And if you don’t treat the busboy well and you don’t treat the bartender well, then they’re not going to help you. Restaurants are systems where you have to all work in tandem, and there has to be a lot of respect for each other because you need each other. Once I got into publishing, it was not that.
You really spill the tea—in a classy way—about a hyperspecific era of girlbossing.
This is not in any way a book of vengeance or a tell-all. But those stories are so important because in the 2010s, female leaders lost our way. I say it in the book. It was an overcorrection and it was a mess, and we were no better than the men. And it was wealthy white women heading it up.
I’m a white woman, obviously, but I’m not a white woman from means. And the privilege that I saw on display in the workplaces that I was in was horrifying. And while I wasn’t a player, I had a front-row seat. And I felt like it was important to reveal what I saw from that view.
Alta Journal is rooted in California and the West, so I gotta ask: How important is geography and a sense of place to you?
I was all East Coast my whole life. And I moved very easily through New York. I’ve never felt as comfortable in my life as I did in New York. The combination of Philly and New York in me was very combustible. So I kind of came to L.A. a little bit kicking and screaming. But without the move to California, I don’t think I would have grown, changed, and discovered what was really going on with me, or slowed down enough to process who I am and what motivates me.
I don’t know that I want to be here forever, but I recognize California as a place that has had profound healing for me. There’s an earnestness—and I know these are gross generalizations—here that would just never fly in New York. There’s, you know, woo everywhere, and some of it can be quite nurturing and quite nice. It’s allowed me to self-actualize in a way I would have been too self-conscious to do on the East Coast. I don’t know if I would have given myself permission to be in that kind of space if I still lived in New York, so California has been incredibly beneficial and healing.•
Min Liao grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a past (analog) life, she was a print journalist in Seattle, Washington. She currently runs the culinary program for an organic farm and artist residency in upstate New York.
