Emi Nietfeld is done reaching for redemption in 'Acceptance'
The memoir 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.
With conventional framing, Emi Nietfeld's life story could be fodder for a Lifetime movie not unlike Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story.
Like Murray, Nietfeld went, well, from homelessness to Harvard University. She grew up with a mother who hoarded, in a home that reeked of mouse urine. At 13, she attempted suicide; at 14, she was hospitalized for an eating disorder. She saw both as ways out of her hopeless life.
Soon, Nietfeld became fixated on another form of escape: getting into an Ivy League university. She held fast to that dream through stints in a residential treatment facility and in foster care, and wrote her college essays while living out of her car during summer break from boarding school. Upon graduation from
