Acceptance

Description

“Nietfeld’s gifts for capturing the fury of living at the mercy of bad circumstances, for critiquing the hero’s journey even while she tells it, make Acceptance a remarkable memoir.” —The New York Times Book Review

A luminous, generation-defining memoir of foster care and homelessness, Harvard and Big Tech, examining society’s fixation with resilience—and its cost

As a homeless teenager writing college essays in her rusty Toyota Corolla, Emi Nietfeld was convinced that the Ivy League was the only escape from her dysfunctional childhood. But upward mobility required crafting the perfect resilience narrative. She had to prove that she was an “overcomer,” made stronger by all that she had endured.

The truth was more complicated. Emi’s mom was a charming hoarder who had her put on antipsychotics but believed in her daughter’s brilliance—unlike the Minnesotan foster family who banned her “pornographic” art history flash cards (of Michelangelo’s David). Emi’s other parent vanished shortly after coming out as trans, a situation few understood in the mid-2000s. Her own past was filled with secrets: mental health struggles, Adderall addiction, and the unbecoming desperation of a teenager fending for herself. And though Emi would go on to graduate from Harvard and become a software engineer at Google, she found that success didn’t necessarily mean safety.

Both a chronicle of the American Dream and an indictment of it, this searing debut exposes the price of trading a troubled past for the promise of a bright future. Told with a ribbon of dark humor, Acceptance challenges our ideas of what it means to overcome—and find contentment on your own terms.“Acceptance is no simple story of transcendence, and instead complicates the narrative of pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps. It is page-turning, raw, and darkly funny.” —BuzzFeed

“A raw, insightful memoir—from childhood neglect to Harvard and Big Tech—tenderly baring the underbelly of what we call ‘success.’” —People

“Acceptance is not a phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes tale. Instead, Nietfeld refuses silver linings and focuses on the toll of contorting oneself into a ‘perfect, deserving’ victim who was ‘hurt in just the right way.’ As such, Acceptance serves as a necessary corrective to what she notes is called ‘the gospel of grit’ in discussions of hardship in America, and an indictment of not just the systems that failed Nietfeld, but of a society that only wants to hear from its most vulnerable when they exhibit post-traumatic growth. . . . It’s a perspective that we can all learn from.” —NPR
 
“Gripping, inspiring, and darkly humorous.” —Philadelphia Inquirer, “Best New Books of the Month”

“In breaking from the Cinderella-story convention of social mobility memoirs, Acceptance achieves exceptional candor and beauty.” —The Cleveland Review of Books

“Acceptance is gripping, fascinating, funny and thought-provoking . . . Nietfeld’s book and her life are extraordinary accomplishments, and she’s wonderful company.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A narrative with all the propulsion of a novel . . . Acceptance will draw inevitable comparisons to Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle, for good reason. . . . Acceptance is a gripping, urgent memoir in an era when social mobility feels beset from all sides. Nietfeld recasts the myth of resilience as a veil for society’s failure to empower vulnerable individuals. And in her pursuit of healing, she offers the hope that even in our darkest moments, there is a future—and within it, the ability to be fully present.” —The Southern Review of Books

“Nietfeld’s memoir offers an absorbing and clear-eyed view into her dysfunctional childhood—including living with her mother, who was a hoarder; navigating homelessness and foster care; and her own mental health struggles—and how she made her way out (for better or worse) onto the other side to achieve societal ‘success.’” —The Millions’ “Most Anticipated of August”

“Heart-pounding. . . . Nietfeld’s raw resilience and candor will keep readers enthralled until the very last page. This hits hard.” —Publishers Weekly

“[Nietfeld’s] impressive debut is a radical probe into our society’s insistence on resiliency through unthinkable struggles, leading readers to reexamine long-held definitions of success.” —Booklist

“A complex meditation on desperation, leveraging personal pain, and how the drive to achieve can be a gift and a pathology simultaneously. . . . A powerful memoir of overcoming adversity that also effectively interrogates the concept of meritocracy.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“[A] captivating page-turner. . . . She expertly describes the determined mindset with which she tackled seemingly unrealistic goals while also battling almost impossible setbacks; readers will find themselves rooting for Nietfeld. . . . A gripping firsthand account of a teenager navigating homelessness and the foster care system. It should appeal to many and may be of particular interest to school counselors, foster parents, psychologists, social workers, and others who work with children in difficult situations.” —Library Journal

“The debut of a formidable talent. . . Acceptance feels like this generation’s Prozac Nation.” —Bruce Feiler, New York Times bestselling author

“From the blind spots of the foster care system to the ivied walls of Harvard Yard, Acceptance offers an intimate and eye-opening look at the stark reality that belies the myth of meritocracy and the American Dream. In spare prose, Emi Nietfeld shows that, more than elite credentials and material wealth, transcending adversity comes down to the stories we choose to tell. I couldn’t put it down.” —Qian Julie Wang, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Country

“Wrenching, page-turning, and alive with dark humor, Acceptance illuminates our society’s obsession with precise forms of vulnerability—racialized, blameless, and impossible for any real child to deliver. Now in the first decade of her adulthood, Emi Nietfeld gives a sharp and ultimately triumphant report on a landscape that few teenagers survive with their voices intact. I read with my heart in my throat.” —Lacy Crawford, author of Notes on a Silencing

“Foster care, psych wards, and antipsychotic medication all fail a heroine who slips through every crack. From the first, we know that Emi Nietfeld eventually finds her way through soul-crushing circumstances. But how? There is rowing, computer code, and the sacraments of Harvard. Then, there’s doing the detective work to confront your demons. Acceptance is an engrossing, affirming story of human resilience, with the pacing of a thriller.” —Sherry Turkle, MIT professor, author of Reclaiming Conversation and The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

“In a voice marked by both keen insight and emotional force, Nietfeld’s Acceptance traces the narrator’s hellbent journey up and out of her own origins, revealing in the process both the individual cost of chasing this particular American dream, and the tragic—almost pyrrhic—victory of ‘success.’ A powerful and compelling read.” —Marya Hornbacher, New York Times bestselling author of Madness and WastedEmi Nietfeld is a writer and software engineer. After graduating from Harvard College in 2015, she worked at Google and Facebook. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Rumpus, Vice, and other publications. She lives in New York City with her family.
 General Discussion Questions: 
1. Which scenes from the book were the most memorable for you?
2. Despite the challenges of Emi’s upbringing, there are multiple moments of lightness and humor within the book. Are there any moments that made you feel hopeful, or laugh
3. Emi interacts with a number of social workers, teachers, health care professionals, and influential adults throughout her adolescence. How do the adults in Emi’s life try to help her? In what ways do they fail?
4. After Emi is rejected from Yale, she changes her strategy for college admissions. What does she learn about admissions from this experience?  What did you learn about college admissions – and the way our society thinks about mental health?
5. Throughout the book Emi comes up against many definitions for “resilience.” How do her beliefs about resilience change over the course of the book? What are your beliefs about resilience? Did this book change them?
6. For Emi, getting into college seemed like her best path to upward mobility and personal agency. Discuss the ways her expectations for Harvard did or did not match her experience there. Which aspects of her experience surprised/did not surprise you? If you attended higher education, how did her experience relate to yours?
7. What did extracurricular activities like photography and rowing offer to Emi? Does this affect the way you think about the importance of extracurriculars in schools?
8. Throughout her journey, Emi encounters multiple people who surprise her with acts of kindness. Are there any in particular that stood out to you, and if so, what made them so impactful? Were there acts of kindness that shapes her own life?
9. At the end of the book, Emi decides to part ways with her mother. What motivates her to take this action? What were your feelings about this? Have you ever been estranged from a family member or considered estrangement?
10. Emi’s book is titled Acceptance, and she spent much of her young adulthood seeking community and support, be that through school, friends, family, or work. Where does Emi finally find and feel accepted?
 
For Health Care Professionals:
1. After her mother sought medical treatment for Emi’s numerous injuries and illnesses, doctors and nurses decided to medicate her with antidepressants and antipsychotics, rather than understand the underlying conditions that led to these health issues. What led to Emi’s stay at the hospital, and later, an inpatient youth treatment center?  
2.     While living in a youth treatment center, Emi and her peers were frequently told to take responsibility for their lives. How did this approach change the way Emi perceived her own struggles?
3.     As a teenager, many of the mental healthcare professionals and doctors Emi encounters became preoccupied with her appearance. Why do you think they chose to focus on Emi’s hair or dress?
 
For Educators:
1.     What role did school play in Emi’s adolescence? How did different educators in her life support or neglect her needs as a student?
2.     What was the significance of arts education in Emi’s development? How can opportunities for arts education and extracurriculars support student growth and confidence?
3.     What was Emi’s criteria for the colleges and universities she applied to? Did it change as she went through the admissions process?
 
For Parents:
1.     As she grows up, Emi’s relationship with her mother changes, and she comes to realize there are significant needs not being met by her biological family. What other adult mentors does she find, and in what ways do they support her?
2.     While living in foster care, Emi often feels torn between her loyalty to her mother and the expectations of her foster parents. What does she get from each household, and what is missing? 
3.     In high school, Emi found summer and school break housing with many of her friends and their parents. If your child had a friend without summer housing, what questions might you ask them? Are there any ways you might support them differently?
 
For Students:
1.     As a high school student, Emi felt tremendous pressure to get into college in order to change her life. How does the college admissions process make you feel?
2.     After she gets into an arts boarding school, Emi decides to switch her focus from photography to writing. What prompts her to make this decision? Can you think of a time when you had to decide between multiple subjects or activities you liked?
3.     After she gets to Harvard, Emi struggles to find things in common with her fellow students. Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like an outsider? What strategies did you use to find friends or community? One

Before my first day of prekindergarten, I knelt beside my bed and prayed, “Dear Lord Jesus, please let me learn how to read.” Then I cried, filled with the desire to learn and terrified that I’d fail. It became one of my mom’s favorite stories about me: how studious I was, how sincere.

By the end of the week, I was tearing through books. All I wanted to do was study. I memorized Bible verses competitively and planned to attend the best college in the world: Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. With God’s blessing, anything was possible-I could disprove evolution, become a medical missionary, find a cure for AIDS, and perform praise pop to sold-out stadiums. Meanwhile, my teachers called home about my uncombed hair, dirty socks, and shrunken shirts. Every few months, my dad’s mother, Grandma Edna, visited and made me cry as she critiqued my grooming, dragging me to the beauty school to get an awful haircut.

“Some of us have to work for a living,” my mom huffed as soon as my grandmother left. My mom earned the money; she and I did all the housework. My father had briefly been a nurse but stopped working before I was born. He believed it was the women’s job to cook and clean (unless it was warm enough to grill bratwursts).

My mom bemoaned what had become of her life. As a girl, she’d dreamed of attending Stanford. “I almost got in,” she told everyone she could. “I think they only rejected me because I was sixteen.” Remaining at home was not an option: her parents starved their daughters, allowing each of them a single can of Metrecal diet drink for breakfast and making them do calisthenics while chanting songs in unison. (All four sisters would go on to struggle with their weight, chronic illnesses, and hoarding.) Eager to escape, my mom fled to a rural campus of the University of Minnesota, where she studied art and education and then got a job at the state crime lab.

Apparently, everything would have been different if my mom had gone to Stanford. Especially when things were tense with my father, she rhapsodized about how she could have been living in California, with palm trees and an ocean, instead of scraping ice off her windshield six months out of the year. She would have married a medical student who made good money and helped out at home, instead of marrying two deadbeats, one after the other.

I doubted that things were so simple, an inevitable path from point A to point B. Like when my mom told the story of how she met my dad: she was thirty-eight, with a ten-year-old son from her first marriage, and longed for a blonde daughter to name “Honey.” My dad had a hazy backstory involving photography school, a botched surgery, a monastery, lots of LSD, hallucinations of headless chickens falling from trees, and a stint in solitary confinement after throwing baby bottles full of blood at the Pentagon. When my mom met him, he’d been bouncing around for twenty years. He had platinum hair and stonewashed blue eyes but no stable address. Two months later, she married him, even though the son from her first marriage begged her not to. Ten-year-old Noah feared a stepfather and a baby would sabotage his future. My mom told this story with a laugh because Noah’s premonition proved true: my father didn’t want a stepson and banished Noah downstairs to raise himself. My dad didn’t want kids, period. “But he was too lazy to go buy condoms!” my mom told me, chuckling. Just after she turned forty, she gave birth to me.

Luckily, when my father held me, “he fell in love.” He nixed the “Honey” idea and named me Margaret Frances. My father was home every day, watching Jeopardy! or building computers, our half-Maltese, half-cockapoo mutt, Poochie, sitting beside him. I didn’t mind his strict rules: no nail polish (too sexy), no sports (filled with lesbians), no Girl Scouts (filled with lesbians and abortionists). Even when I wasn’t allowed to see Noah, it made sense: he was my half brother, not my real brother, according to my father. Both my parents called me an only child. But as the years passed, my mom chafed over my dad’s controlling ways and started spending her lunch hours scouring the clearance sections at local stores. She shopped in secret, buying a hundred Winnie-the-Pooh watches for one dollar each at Target, hiding the loot in her office. After piano recitals, she snuck me to McDonald’s for ice cream-outings that would become her favorite memories.

I couldn’t stand hearing my mom complain, the way she acted as if she had no agency. By the time I was eight, I told her all the time, “If you hate my dad so much, why don’t you just get a divorce?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said in the voice that indicated I was cluelessly naive. After my father lost his job, my grandma had given him a trust fund worth two hundred thousand dollars. It was a lot of money, even to Grandma Edna, the widow of a small-town doctor. My mom, bitterly, called it “a retainer for our marriage.” During the boom years of the nineties, the interest my parents withdrew was almost as much as my mom made working full time. The money did its job: my parents stayed together, and we lived in a suburb and rented out the duplex my mom owned in Minneapolis. We were middle class, almost exactly at the median-but if one thing changed, we wouldn’t be anymore.

When the dot-com bubble burst, my parents started fighting more: my dad blocking my mom in the doorway, my parents throwing phone books in the kitchen, my mom calling the police, both of them sitting in a squad car, the cop telling them to civilly decide who’d file the tax returns while I hid in the garage.

That same year, I became the state champion in Bible memorization. I walked door-to-door by myself hawking fundraising calendars and sold so many I got to ride in a limo. While my parents yelled at each other downstairs, I lay on my mattress and schemed about how I could hijack the ABBA cover band the A-Teens and rewrite their songs to glorify the Lord. I took for granted that, no matter what happened in my life, I could escape into my ambitions; they would transport me to a future where the way I grew up couldn’t matter less.

One morning, my mom pulled me out of fourth grade and swore me to secrecy. “I’m not going to lie to my father!” I argued. “It’s a sin.” But then she bribed me with Radio Disney, a rare secular treat. Rain pounded on the windshield and Lil’ Bow Wow crooned on AM 1440 as my mom drove me to see my first therapist.

We pulled into an office park. Inside a dumpy building, a lady wearing fancy shoes took me to a room filled with toys. Smiling, she asked me to make a family out of dolls. A one-way observation mirror stretched along the wall.

Immediately, I suspected why my mom had brought me to therapy: she was looking for a confession of abuse, something that would justify leaving and make it easier for her to win custody. I folded my arms and refused to draw a house or play in the sandbox. When the therapist dropped me back off with my mom, she explained, “Sometimes it takes a while for the resistance to wear down.”

After that, I didn’t trust shrinks, and I didn’t trust my mom, who seemed irritated she’d taken time off work to get nothing. “I can’t believe you made me miss school,” I complained as she drove me back. My mom reached over and flicked off the radio, “. . . Baby One More Time” giving way to the swoosh of windshield wipers.

It almost seemed as if my mom wanted me to have been abused, in some gruesome way she didn’t know about, because it would make her life easier. She claimed she took me to therapy because she wanted to help. But nothing was wrong with me, besides that I was a bookworm with a bowl cut dressed in outgrown clothes whose parents hated each other.

Or maybe my mom was sad that I wasn’t a “child”: I’d been doing all my family’s dishes and laundry since I was five. I often shoveled our driveway for hours, my labor cheaper than buying a snowblower. But I was that way because I had to be. In my responsibilities and my grand dreams, I found independence, believing I was the star of God’s great saga. Now I felt like a pawn in my mom’s plans.

In the end, my mom didn’t need me to produce a confession: that spring, my dad told me he was changing his name to Michelle. After the ‘stunning announcement,’ my mom moved out and into the lower part of the duplex she owned in the city. I lived with Michelle while my parents fought over custody.

“How do you feel?” a social worker asked me. I sat on my hands in an office filled with boxes and manila envelopes. The filing cabinets, I was sure, contained the lives of kids like me, locked up for eternity in this windowless bureaucracy with musty carpet that irritated my allergies.

“Fine,” I replied, guarded. Like the play therapist, the custody evaluators wanted to extract secrets. They would read whatever they wanted into what I said. One wrong word, I suspected, could destroy my life.

All of them called me “traumatized”-by the divorce, but mostly by the fact that my father was coming out as a woman. It was 2002; there hadn’t even been a trans person on Oprah. No one would believe me that I was relieved my parents had separated. Once she started transitioning, Michelle was happier and nicer. She became a Unitarian, and I quickly stopped believing in an Abrahamic God who sent Girl Scouts to hell with their lesbian lovers, the abortionists. If my loss of faith was a loss, I didn’t realize it. At my new public school in the suburbs, where I went to fifth grade, I even got to play the drums.

“I want to live with Michelle,” I told the social worker and everyone who’d listen.

She nodded empathetically, then reminded me that they didn’t consider children’s wishes until they turned twelve. I was only ten, so my preference didn’t matter. The process infuriated me. Why ask how I felt if it didn’t matter what I wanted, as if my desires were completely decoupled from my emotional state? Maybe, as people, the social workers cared. But, to the system, it didn’t matter. The entire custody evaluation seemed like a joke. For months, my mom moved boxes of all the junk she’d quickly accumulated into the rental apartment upstairs, which she’d left vacant to use as storage. At the home visit, we wore matching sweaters and showed off our sewing projects. They thought we were so cute; I didn’t think to pick a fight with my mom or tell the social workers to look upstairs.

The Friday night before I started sixth grade, Michelle came home from family court and told me to pack. “D’s on her way,” she said: my mom had won custody.

I was moving in with my mom, changing school districts, leaving my friends without saying goodbye. Michelle was moving away, across the country, saying she couldn’t keep dealing with my mom. I’d see her a few more times that month; then, after one phone call, we’d never have another conversation. Bleary-eyed, I shoved my Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and library books into a black plastic garbage bag and kissed Poochie goodbye.

My mom’s car pulled up in the driveway, headlights blazing, victorious.

I knew that any reasonable parent in my mom’s situation would take their kid to therapy if they could. But I resisted: What good did it do to talk about things I couldnÕt change that were still unfolding?

When we sat down at the first family therapy session a few months after I moved in with my mom, I learned that counseling wasn’t about my feelings anyway. “I need to collect evidence,” my mom explained to the psychologist as she opened her journal. “In case he”-she used Michelle’s old male name, as always-“tries to contest the custody decision.”

“Michelle,” I hissed, hating my mom and hating the shrink for acting like it was normal for a parent to haul a child to his office and ask the kid, baldly, to provide ammunition.

I recognized that, from my mom’s vantage point, she had rescued me. Without Michelle to spoil our fun, we could drive ten hours each way to go to the world’s number-one amusement park and stay out late on school nights, clearance-shopping until the mall cops escorted us out. We knew how to sing seven different renditions of “Happy Birthday” in harmony. Under the fluorescent lights of Walgreens, we pretended to star in a reality TV show.

My mom had done so much for me, and Michelle had absconded, yet I was completely ungrateful. I missed Poochie. My mom and I were broke, with no more support from my grandma, mired in legal bills and credit card debt, the house full of trash and rustling with mice. At my new underfunded public school in Minneapolis, I was utterly unchallenged and relentlessly bullied. Combining the social skills of a Bible quiz champion with my new provocative secular outfits-including a fishnet-sleeve top and a miniskirt that zipped all the way up, purchased by Michelle for my first day of sixth grade-I was an easy target. Classmates called me a slut and a ho a hundred times a day. Adults told me I needed a thicker skin; there was no way to stop it.

Things went from bad to worse around my eleventh birthday, when an eighth grader started groping me on the bus. When he threatened me and forced me to touch him, I finally told my mom. She’d just come home from work and looked utterly exhausted. “Well, did you tell your teacher?” my mom asked. When I said no, she told me to go tell someone at school: she wasn’t there when it happened; there was nothing she could do. I knew better than to go to her when other bad things happened that year. All my friends seemed to have similar experiences, but we had no cultural depictions we could relate to, no way to talk about it except in whispers in the middle of the night. During the afternoons, scared to be alone, I wandered around with the other children who had no one watching them. Unable to sleep in my own bed, I crawled into my mom’s.US