Ambition Monster
A Memoir
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Narrated by:
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Jennifer Romolini
About this listen
“Entertaining and highly relatable.” —The New York Times
“As hilarious as it is heart-wrenching…[A] gift of storytelling, and an act of reclamation.” —Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author
A deeply personal memoir about workaholism, the addictive nature of ambition, and the humbling process of picking yourself up when the world lets you down—an anti-girlboss tale for our times for listeners of Drinking: A Love Story and Uncanny Valley.
After years of relentlessly racing up the professional ladder, Jennifer Romolini reached the kind of success many crave: a high-profile, C-suite dream job, a book well-received enough that reporters wanted to know the secrets to her success, and a gig traveling around the country giving speeches on “making it.” She had a handsome and clever husband, a precocious child. But beneath this polished surface was a powder keg of unresolved trauma and chronic overwork. It was all about to blow.
Written with self-deprecation and wit, Ambition Monster is a gutsy and powerful look at workaholism and the addictive nature of achievement, the lingering effect of childhood trauma, and the failures of our modern rat race. This is a Cinderella story of success and a brutal appraisal of the cost of capitalism—perfect for people pleasers, overachievers, and those whose traumas have driven them to strike for “goodness,” no matter the cost. With its timely and resonant deconstructing of the American Dream, Ambition Monster is a singular excavation of selfhood, an essential interrogation about the way we work, and an inspiring and affirming call to always bet on yourself.
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- A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
- By: Lori Gottlieb
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 14 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.
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It was like a hallmark movie being waterboarded into my ears for 15 hours
- By Amazon Customer on 10-01-19
By: Lori Gottlieb
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Jennifer Romolini started her career as an awkward 27-year-old misfit, navigated her way through New York media, and became a boss - an editor in chief, an editorial director, and a vice president - all within little more than a decade. Her book, Weird in a World That's Not, asserts that being outside the norm and achieving real, high-level success are not mutually exclusive, even if the perception of the business world often seems otherwise, even if it seems like only office-politicking extroverts are set up for reward.
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“As I sat in the front row that day, I was 80% faking it with a 100% real Gucci bag.” Samhita Mukhopadhyay had finally made it: she had her dream job, dream clothes—dream life. But time and time again, she found herself sacrificing time with family and friends, paying too much for lattes, and limping home after working for twelve hours a day. Success didn't come without costs, right? Or so she kept telling herself. The Myth of Making It is a field guide and manifesto for all of us who are tired, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of hustle culture.
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Here After
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Amy Lin never expected to find a love like the one she shares with her husband, Kurtis, a gifted young architect who pulls her toward joy, adventure, and greater self-acceptance. On a sweltering August morning, only a few months shy of the newlyweds’ move to Vancouver, thirty-two-year-old Kurtis heads out to run a half-marathon with Amy’s family. It’s the last time she sees her husband alive.
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5/5
- By Alyssa Beers on 04-12-24
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Exit Interview
- The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career
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In 2006, Kristi Coulter left her cozy but dull job for a promising new position at the fast-growing Amazon.com, but she never expected the soul-crushing pressure that would come with it. In no time she found the challenge and excitement she'd been craving—along with seven-day workweeks, lifeboat exercises, widespread burnout, and a culture driven largely by fear. But the chase, the visibility, and, let's face it, the stock options proved intoxicating, and so, for twelve years, she stayed—until she no longer recognized the face in the mirror or the mission she'd signed up for.
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Not worth the time
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Consent
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In this close-up look at the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s, when she was seventeen and he was forty-seven and married with two children, Ciment not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1990s memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself if she told the whole truth when she wrote about their passion back then, and what truth looked like to her in the even longer-ago era of love-bead curtains when she fell in love.
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Excellent writing; overworked main question
- By Eric A. Ruthford on 06-18-24
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I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself
- One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris
- By: Glynnis MacNicol
- Narrated by: Glynnis MacNicol
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
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Performance
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Come to Paris, August 2021, when the City of Lights was still empty of tourists and a thirst for long-overdue pleasure gripped those who wandered its streets. After New York City emptied out in March 2020, Glynnis MacNicol, aged forty-six, unmarried with no children, spent sixteen months alone in her tiny Manhattan apartment. The isolation was punishing. A year without touch. Women are warned of invisibility as they age, but this was an extreme loneliness no one can prepare you for. When the opportunity to sublet a friend’s apartment in Paris arose, MacNicol jumped on it.
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Sentence structure; descriptions
- By Marlette Hoxmeier on 07-02-24
By: Glynnis MacNicol
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Weird in a World That's Not
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- By: Jennifer Romolini
- Narrated by: Em Eldridge
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
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Overall
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Jennifer Romolini started her career as an awkward 27-year-old misfit, navigated her way through New York media, and became a boss - an editor in chief, an editorial director, and a vice president - all within little more than a decade. Her book, Weird in a World That's Not, asserts that being outside the norm and achieving real, high-level success are not mutually exclusive, even if the perception of the business world often seems otherwise, even if it seems like only office-politicking extroverts are set up for reward.
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Women's Career Guide
- By Spence on 02-03-18
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The Myth of Making It
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- Narrated by: Samhita Mukhopadhyay
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“As I sat in the front row that day, I was 80% faking it with a 100% real Gucci bag.” Samhita Mukhopadhyay had finally made it: she had her dream job, dream clothes—dream life. But time and time again, she found herself sacrificing time with family and friends, paying too much for lattes, and limping home after working for twelve hours a day. Success didn't come without costs, right? Or so she kept telling herself. The Myth of Making It is a field guide and manifesto for all of us who are tired, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of hustle culture.
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Here After
- A Memoir
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- Narrated by: Amy Lin
- Length: 3 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Amy Lin never expected to find a love like the one she shares with her husband, Kurtis, a gifted young architect who pulls her toward joy, adventure, and greater self-acceptance. On a sweltering August morning, only a few months shy of the newlyweds’ move to Vancouver, thirty-two-year-old Kurtis heads out to run a half-marathon with Amy’s family. It’s the last time she sees her husband alive.
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5/5
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By: Amy Lin
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Exit Interview
- The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career
- By: Kristi Coulter
- Narrated by: Kristi Coulter
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 2006, Kristi Coulter left her cozy but dull job for a promising new position at the fast-growing Amazon.com, but she never expected the soul-crushing pressure that would come with it. In no time she found the challenge and excitement she'd been craving—along with seven-day workweeks, lifeboat exercises, widespread burnout, and a culture driven largely by fear. But the chase, the visibility, and, let's face it, the stock options proved intoxicating, and so, for twelve years, she stayed—until she no longer recognized the face in the mirror or the mission she'd signed up for.
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Not worth the time
- By Anonymous User on 10-01-23
By: Kristi Coulter
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Consent
- A Memoir
- By: Jill Ciment
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens
- Length: 4 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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In this close-up look at the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s, when she was seventeen and he was forty-seven and married with two children, Ciment not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1990s memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself if she told the whole truth when she wrote about their passion back then, and what truth looked like to her in the even longer-ago era of love-bead curtains when she fell in love.
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Excellent writing; overworked main question
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I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself
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- Narrated by: Glynnis MacNicol
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Overall
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Come to Paris, August 2021, when the City of Lights was still empty of tourists and a thirst for long-overdue pleasure gripped those who wandered its streets. After New York City emptied out in March 2020, Glynnis MacNicol, aged forty-six, unmarried with no children, spent sixteen months alone in her tiny Manhattan apartment. The isolation was punishing. A year without touch. Women are warned of invisibility as they age, but this was an extreme loneliness no one can prepare you for. When the opportunity to sublet a friend’s apartment in Paris arose, MacNicol jumped on it.
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Sentence structure; descriptions
- By Marlette Hoxmeier on 07-02-24
By: Glynnis MacNicol
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No One Tells You This
- A Memoir
- By: Glynnis MacNicol
- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
If the story doesn’t end with marriage or a child, what then? This question plagued Glynnis MacNicol on the eve of her 40th birthday. Despite a successful career as a writer, and an exciting life in New York City, Glynnis was constantly reminded she had neither of the things the world expected of a woman her age: a partner or a baby. She knew she was supposed to feel bad about this. After all, single women and those without children are often seen as objects of pity. Glynnis refused to be cast into either of those roles and yet the question remained: What now?
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Disappointing
- By Emily on 07-13-18
By: Glynnis MacNicol
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Uncanny Valley
- A Memoir
- By: Anna Wiener
- Narrated by: Suehyla El-Attar
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In her mid-20s, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener - stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial - left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: A world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory, and, of course, progress.
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Could have been better
- By R. Herz on 01-20-20
By: Anna Wiener
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Love Is a Burning Thing
- A Memoir
- By: Nina St. Pierre
- Narrated by: Nina St. Pierre
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Love Is a Burning Thing, Nina interrogates what happens to those undiagnosed and unseen. This is a transfixing, moving portrait of a mother-daughter relationship that also examines mental health, stigma, poverty, and gender—and the role that spirituality plays within each. Nina’s writing skirts the mystical, untangles it, and ultimately illuminates it with brilliance.
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In depth expansive memour
- By Lynda Sheridan on 06-10-24
By: Nina St. Pierre
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No Judgment
- Essays
- By: Lauren Oyler
- Narrated by: Lauren Oyler
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In her writing for Harper’s, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, Lauren Oyler has emerged as one of the most trenchant and influential critics of her generation, a talent whose judgments on works of literature—whether celebratory or scarily harsh—have become notorious. But what is the significance of being a critic and consumer of media in today’s fraught environment?
By: Lauren Oyler
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Splinters
- Another Kind of Love Story
- By: Leslie Jamison
- Narrated by: Leslie Jamison
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond.
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Felt seen
- By Placeholder on 01-06-25
By: Leslie Jamison
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An Honest Woman
- A Memoir of Love and Sex Work
- By: Charlotte Shane
- Narrated by: Caitlin Kelly
- Length: 4 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In her early twenties, Charlotte Shane quit her women’s studies graduate program to devote herself to sex work because it was a way to devote herself to men. Her lifelong curiosity about male lust, love, selfishness, and social capital dovetailed with her own insatiable desire for intimacy to sustain a long career in escorting, with unexpectedly poignant results. Shane uses her personal and professional history to examine how men and women struggle in their attempts at romantic and sexual bonding, no matter how true their intentions.
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A complete waste of time!
- By McNeil on 09-04-24
By: Charlotte Shane
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Selling the Dream
- The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans
- By: Jane Marie
- Narrated by: Jane Marie
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Peabody and Emmy Award–winning journalist Jane Marie expands on her popular podcast The Dream to expose the scourge of multilevel marketing schemes and how they have profited off the evisceration of the American working class.
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Great expansion of The Dream podcast!!!
- By A. Wright on 10-27-24
By: Jane Marie
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Tell Me Who You Are
- A Novel
- By: Louisa Luna
- Narrated by: Megan Tusing, Robb Moreira, Stephanie Németh-Parker
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Brooklyn psychiatrist Dr. Caroline Strange is certain she knows what's best for her patients, her family, and pretty much everyone else, but that all changes when a troubled young man arrives for his appointment and makes a pair of alarming confessions: I am going to kill someone, and I know who you really are. Dr. Caroline is accustomed to hearing her patients’ deepest, darkest secrets, but it seems Nelson Schack may be one step ahead when detectives show up later that day, inquiring about a missing woman.
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amazing misdirection
- By Raymond R. on 06-16-24
By: Louisa Luna
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Between Two Trailers
- A Memoir
- By: J. Dana Trent, Barbara Brown Taylor - foreword
- Narrated by: J. Dana Trent
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Dana Trent is only a preschooler the first time she uses a razor blade to cut up weed and fill dime bags for her schizophrenic father, King. While King struggles with his unmedicated psychosis, Dana’s mother, the Lady, a cold and self-absorbed woman whose personality disorders rule the home, guards large bricks of drugs from the safety of their squalid trailer. But when the Lady impulsively plucks Dana from the Midwest and moves the two of them south, their fresh start results in homelessness and bankruptcy.
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An unusual and compelling story.
- By Robin Moody on 10-30-24
By: J. Dana Trent, and others
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When the World Didn't End
- A Memoir
- By: Guinevere Turner
- Narrated by: Guinevere Turner
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In this immersive, spell-binding memoir, an acclaimed screenwriter tells the story of her childhood growing up with the infamous Lyman Family cult—and the complicated and unexpected pain of leaving the only home she’d ever known.
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Boring
- By Jes on 06-15-23
By: Guinevere Turner
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The Resilience Myth
- New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma
- By: Soraya Chemaly
- Narrated by: Soraya Chemaly
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
We are often urged to rely only on ourselves for strength, mental fortitude, and positivity. But with her distinctive “skill, wit, and sharp insight” (Laura Bates, author of Girl Up), Soraya Chemaly challenges us to adapt our thinking about how we survive in a world of sustained, overlapping crises. It is interdependence and nurturing relationships that truly sustain us, she argues. Based on comprehensive research and eye-opening examples from real-life, The Resilience Myth offers alternative visions of relational hardiness by emphasizing care for others and our environments above all.
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My next book club selection
- By Tipsy Crone on 06-07-24
By: Soraya Chemaly
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Hell If We Don't Change Our Ways
- A Memoir
- By: Brittany Means
- Narrated by: Brittany Means
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Brittany Means’s childhood was a blur of highways and traumas that collapsed any effort to track time. Riding shotgun as her mother struggled to escape abusive relationships, Brittany didn’t care where they were going. But as Brittany grew older and questioned her own complicated relationships and the poverty, abuse, and instability that enveloped her, she began to recognize that hell wasn’t only the place she read about in the Bible; it was the cycle of violence that entrapped her family.
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Read if you want to be more compassionate towards others…
- By Ambar Gavidia on 02-12-24
By: Brittany Means
What listeners say about Ambition Monster
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- Liad Pernock
- 06-06-24
Honest, authentic, relatable
While Jenn’s story is her own, her insights and lessons are so relatable. The writing is vivid and emotional. Highly recommend.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 06-20-24
Spoke to my soul
I found this book based on a friend recommendation. I knew from the title alone it would be exactly what I needed to hear and I loved Jennifer’s writing style and storytelling as it was so palpable, vulnerable, raw and real. I felt seen, heard, and sometime gut punched as I listened to her story. I didn’t know of Jennifer before reading this book but I’m so thankful to have discovered this book and for her taking the time to share her journey. This was a GREAT read and I highly recommend!
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- Jennifer Howland
- 07-05-24
Hey Ambition Monsters out there, and you know who you are, READ THIS!
Jennifer’s story/epic life tale was beautifully crafted and delivered by the author. Don’t miss this.
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- Alyson McAtee
- 08-14-24
A look behind the messy curtain of NY and Hollywood Media
This is a story of a woman who go came back to reality after selling herself at far to low a price to corporate media machines. Not a story commonly told, but very well done.
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- Svetlana Evgenevna Braunscheidel
- 07-16-24
Amazing.
I dont have the words to explain how amazing this book is, just… thank you for writing it!
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- Robin Raff
- 10-11-24
Authentic, smart and thought provoking.
I loved this book! Great narration by the author who is intelligent, articulate and entertaining. She touched on topics around childhood trauma, that I've struggled with and explored in therapy for many years, and shed new light on them. I related to her career stress as if she was describing my own experiences. This is an important book of human emotions that are very relatable.
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- paula
- 06-29-24
Hits home in so many ways.
Right book, right time of life. Big thank you to Jenn for writing this - for herself and for those of us who have been running up the ladder with something to prove.
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- James
- 06-07-24
Love love love
Wow, I burned through this book like it was my job! Truly an endearing and heartwarming personal story sprinkled with moments of laughing out loud (which I rarely do). The author feels like a friend who describes life better than you can, making you feel less alone and far more understood.
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- joshua meyer
- 06-23-24
An important and timely book
I found the story very compelling and relatable as someone who also grew up in a chaotic home and internalized a punishing perfectionist work ethic as my primary means of escape. The author’s story really helped me to understand how my own childhood and familial trauma led to my unhealthy relationship with work. It definitely helped me to be kinder to myself about having spent decades neglecting my health, personal life and relationships due to putting all of my energy and time into my career.
Thank you Jennifer Romolini for putting this into the world!
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- Adrian Y.
- 10-13-24
Authentic and Transcendental
For performance driven females born in the 70s and 80s this assures you are not alone. Thank you Jennifer for writing this book and taking the time to piece the epiphanies together and share them.
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