Acceptance: A Memoir - Hardcover

Nietfeld, Emi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593489470 ISBN 13: 9780593489475

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

“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 hard-hitting and hilarious memoir of ambition, desperation, and the dark side of grit

Growing up in a house filled with dirty feather boas and fearless mice, Emi Nietfeld dreams of escaping to the Ivy League. Emi’s single mom believes in her, but can’t stop hoarding—catapulting Emi into the underworld of troubled teen treatment, foster care, and homelessness. When her shot arrives to trade sleeping in her car for the hallowed halls of an elite college, Emi must decide: How far will she go to market herself as a perfect “overcomer” when her problems are far from over? And what will it cost to maintain that illusion at Harvard and into adulthood?
 
From journalist, mental health advocate, and software engineer Emi Nietfeld, this searing coming-of-age story is both a chronicle of the American Dream and an indictment of it. Exposing the price of trading a troubled past for the promise of a bright future, Nietfeld explores whether any amount of success can make trauma worth it. With a ribbon of dark humor, Acceptance challenges our ideas of what it means to overcome—and live on your own terms.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Emi Nietfeld is a journalist, mental health advocate, and software engineer. After graduating from Harvard College in 2015, she worked at Google, an experience she wrote about in her viral New York Times essay, “After Working At Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again.” Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Teen Vogue, Slate, and other publications. She lives in New York City with her family.

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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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593489470
• ISBN 13: 9780593489475
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland