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.
