an alternate ending

the last deleted ambition monster scene

Programming note: To commemorate the paperback release, I’m running deleted chapters/scenes from the first draft of Ambition Monster all week. This is the original ending of the book, which was deemed “too dark” by both my editor and a few early-reader close friends. Eventually, I cut this chapter and added an epilogue that brought us into the present, updating the manuscript by telling the story about my grandmother’s death essentially as it happened.

With this final epilogue decision, I knew I was making the book lean more toward a “family” memoir than one simply focused on work, but by this time I knew my thesis: That our relationship to ambition is largely defined and dictated by where we come from, that work is intimate and personal and relational. That without real clarity and self understanding, it can be difficult for many of us (particularly workaholics) to separate ‘what we do’ from ‘who we are.’

Metamorphosis

Alex is assigned a story about Popeye Village, a janky amusement park located on the northwest coast of the island of Malta originally built as an elaborate set — 20 or so wooden cottages on a cliffside overlooking a clear-blue bay — for Robert Altman’s 1980 film Popeye starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, a place which exists today as a bizarro tourist attraction constructed of the film’s remains. It’s a big travel assignment and a long trip and, because the magazine is putting him up and lodging is free, and because I no longer have a job-job, we decide to go as a family, enjoy a shared adventure, a luxury of days off we could never afford when I was working at full speed. An assignment Alex may not have thought to take when my career stole all our family’s time.