At 17, Minneapolis native Emi Nietfeld won a prestigious national writing award and told a Twin Cities newspaper reporter that she wanted to write a memoir. Thirteen years later, "Acceptance" has been published, and it's extraordinary.
Her basic story is homeless in Hennepin County to Harvard to Google, Facebook, love, marriage and a memoir. The outcome is known and yet the book is gripping, fascinating, funny and thought-provoking. I read it quickly after Nietfeld hooked me with a perfect opening paragraph in which she describes her wary, attempted introduction of her new in-laws to her unreliable, damaging mother, a hoarder whose feces-infested home Nietfeld had to leave as an adolescent.
The opener sets the uncompromisingly candid tone of the book. We follow her striving and surviving repeated stretches of homelessness, boarding school and sexual assault. She triumphs but questions the costs.
This is pointedly not a feel-good tale of a kid who beat the odds. Instead, Nietfeld questions and critiques the systems that left her in a sort of parental limbo and compelled her to leverage her trauma for entry into the educational elite and eventually economic stability. While the book isn't an outright indictment of the Hennepin County foster care system, it's impossible to read it and not wonder what could have been done to make it better. Nietfeld's book and her life are extraordinary accomplishments and she's wonderful company.
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"Acceptance"
By: Emi Nietfeld.
Publisher: Penguin Press, 368 pages, $27.
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