Emi Nietfeld always valued education. School was her happy place. Bouncing from foster care to boarding school and into intermittent homelessness where she was vulnerable to predators, she never lost her determination to grasp a better life. Her memoir Acceptance (Penguin, 2022) chronicles her traumatic upbringing: her parents’ divorce that led to her living with her mother—a hoarder whose house was overrun with mice and mold—and a sexual assault in middle school that led to a suicide attempt, placement in a treatment facility after being diagnosed anorexic, and then into the troubled teen industry. Her tenacity to work hard and not give up took her to Harvard and awarded her a scholarship from Clarence Thomas’s pet charity, the Horatio Alger Association. However, despite outwardly overcoming the worst, there was a cost, which she attempts to come to terms with in her memoir.
Nietfeld and I met this summer at the Sewanee Writers Conference, where we immediately connected over our respective challenges resulting from being identified as “troubled” when we were teenagers and spending pivotal parts of our adolescence in the troubled teen industry.
We spoke recently via Zoom on writing about adolescent trauma, how race and class impact adolescent mental health treatment, and how conversion therapy is utilized in the troubled teen industry.
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The Rumpus: Acceptance is a coming-of-age memoir that opens with a scene from the near present. Did you always feel you needed to begin with the adult narrator, and if so, why?
Emi Nietfeld: I feel memoir is actually a very constrained form. We almost expect there to be a flash-forward in every single memoir. I really resisted it, in part because I feel it can remove tension by telling people “Oh, by the way, I’m okay.” I don’t love the idea that we’re only going to care about stories that result in happy endings. At the same time, I heard from so many readers “I could only read the book because I knew that you became an adult,” that I had at least an outwardly happy life.
Rumpus: You skip over some traumatic experiences, like the one you addressed in this Rumpus piece. Can you discuss the necessity of being selective about which traumas you address in memoir?
Nietfeld: One of the big technical challenges of writing Acceptance was that bad things kept happening. We don’t read a memoir and expect that at the end of the second act some new bad big thing will come up, right? After I was assaulted, I was in an abusive relationship. It was this challenge to figure out how these fit into the trajectory of my life. What were the things that made those traumas more possible? I think in hindsight, I was a vulnerable young person. I was desperate for somebody to love me and take care of me.
Rumpus: You were assaulted after you had supposedly been rehabilitated in the troubled teen industry. Do you think that there’s any connection between the abuse that you suffered in the troubled teen industry and in later intimate relationships
Nietfeld: Before I wrote Acceptance, I saw my life in two distinct chapters. It’s very common among survivors to break life into the before and after. In that way of looking at the world, there was no bridge, no connection—the world snapped in two. A big part of writing Acceptance was forming that bridge between my younger teenage self and my adult self.
One of the things that I thought about a lot were the relationships that primed me to be a victim of intimate partner violence. I thought a lot about my parents and then also this residential treatment center with its super punitive punishment system, where if I displeased the people in power, I would receive strict consequences. It was dehumanizing. I was just part of the system, just another resident. It really set me up to think, “That is how relationships work. One party has power and the other doesn’t.” It was really hard for me later to recognize anything was wrong, even though there were very early red flags. After talking to other people who were at this residential treatment center with me, almost everybody seems to have been in an abusive relationship. It’s a really common pattern.
Rumpus: How did you differentiate between writing for catharsis and what you included in the book?
Nietfeld: So often in writing circles, there’s this attitude of “write from your scars, not from your wounds” and that unprocessed stories are gross and indulgent and shameful. But I’m a firm believer that the most important thing with writing like this is to put whatever you need to say on the page and then have someone read it and then tell you that you’re still a good person. We all need to be seen and heard as human beings. As a writer, I need that validation before I can even think about editing and craft. Then I can go in and think about what details serve the story.
Rumpus: Agreed. One of the ways I deal with being oppressed by the troubled teen industry (TTI) is researching its origins, and the more I research it, the more convinced I am that it’s specifically designed to enforce social, racial, and gender hierarchies. Do you have any insight?
Nietfeld: One of the things I realized about my facility was that there were two units. Unit one, which I was on, was almost all white. The unit above us was virtually all children of color. A lot of those kids had been sent there by courts. The staff was harsher. I remember [the segregation] being justified as “Oh, well, they’re criminals. They’re there for different reasons.” Even though in my unit people were mistreated, we were told, “Oh, you’re here because you were bad,” there was this hierarchy—there’s “bad” and there’s “criminal bad.” Even though I knew for a fact that some of the [Black and Latinx] girls had been sex-trafficked, and their crime was being raped. That was literally a physical manifestation of that racial hierarchy in society, where unit one was one floor down, closer to freedom, one less set of stairs.
There was also just so much emphasis on gender norms and on reinforcing what we were supposed to wear. One of the things I wrote about was that they took away all my old clothes and got rid of them and replaced them with hyper-feminine t-shirts. I wasn’t allowed to wear a boy’s T-shirt. It had to be a girl’s cut from the Target girls’ section—with flowers, a cartoon animal. I had to let them braid my hair, paint my nails, under the guise of self-care. I identify as a woman and I always have, but it was disturbing to me to be put through these feminization proceedings and be taught that the only healthy and acceptable way to be is to be pretty, feminine, and put-together. Being a tomboy was not okay. It was, in hindsight, a lot worse for my peers, who were trans or who were gender nonconforming, but they were being subjected to the same kind of treatment.
Rumpus: They were coerced into conforming to a gender norm. One of the things I’ve been really interested in is the way conversion therapy is utilized in the TTI. I was in a religious program. What was it like in a secular program?
Nietfeld: It’s important to acknowledge that the place I was in is better than many because sometimes people read Acceptance and then they say, “That place was horrific,” but there are lots of places that are so much worse. Children’s Residential Treatment Center. It was not religious. And yet, I totally see that theme of conversion therapy because the point of the institution was not “Oh, you have trauma that you need to work through,” or even “You have a mental illness you need to stabilize from or heal from,” but it was really “There’s this acceptable type of person to be, and we will break you into that person.” That person was definitely heteronormative, conforming to the extreme because you’re taught, every single day, if you deviate, you will be punished, you will deserve that punishment because you made a choice in how you act. It really distills the idea of identity into action, where it’s all you are or your actions, and if you’re making bad choices, you’re bad. Those kinds of themes have definitely haunted me over the years, in a lot of different aspects of my life, including in sexuality. It’s only very recently that I’ve been more comfortable being out as bisexual, and that has coincided with major cultural shifts. But part of that is I’m afraid of being punished as I walk through the world. I’m constantly afraid of getting in trouble, which feels kind of crazy to say because I went to Harvard. I have enormous privilege in my life, but part of me is still trapped in that system, where I’m just desperate to go outside. I’m ready to do anything so that I won’t get another consequence.
Rumpus: What is the cost of writing through trauma? How did you/do you practice self-care when writing? Do you have any insights for others trying to write through their own really difficult stories?
Nietfeld: I’ve almost exclusively written about personal, painful topics, so the only way I can tell how taxing it is is when I try writing about something unfraught and then am amazed at how easy it is!
When I was deep in drafting and going into that dark place every single day, I was superstitious and never wrote about hard stuff in my apartment. Instead, I’d go to coffee shops and just have tears running down my face. I also worked out a lot, sometimes too much. The most productive time of the day is the ten minutes before you have to run to a yoga class.
I ended up seeking out therapy because I realized I needed it to get unstuck. I really wish I had gone to quality trauma therapy sooner. If writing is therapy, then it’s pretty bad therapy. I did not need to be struggling alone. My lack of professional help for many years did not improve my art. If anything, it kept my writing spinning in circles.
Rumpus: During your adolescence, you were prescribed nearly a dozen different psychiatric drugs, which you later realized were unnecessary. Later on, you figure out that to get into the Ivy League, you have to hide that history.
Nietfeld: When I was applying to college, my history with psychiatry and mental health treatment became a huge liability. My transcripts were a mess. I had to try to find a way to explain it. I initially tried just telling the truth. I got rejected early from Yale and learned that nobody was going to look at my psychiatric past and think that it was a reflection of my circumstances. They were going to see it as a reflection of me. So when I was applying to college in the regular decision rounds, I completely omitted it. I realized that they just wanted somebody who had been through foster care, who had experienced homelessness but who was psychologically, perfectly healthy and perfectly intact. That got me into Harvard.
Rumpus: How does omission work its way into your writing now? Do you find freedom on the page to be your full self, or do you still find past experiences, like TTI or other abusive relationships, impact your writing?
Nietfeld: The nice thing about promoting a book is that you have to tell your story a million times and in a million different ways—and you don’t want to give away too much because then who will spend $27 on a hardcover?! It’s made me very, very comfortable with omission. It’s also been a bit like extended exposure therapy, where the worst moments of my life are now somehow boring. That is very refreshing.
Rumpus: What was your path to publication?
Nietfeld: I have known I wanted to write Acceptance since I was a teenager. I wrote my first draft right after I graduated college, in November 2015 (Thank you, National Novel Writing Month)! At the time, I was a software engineer at Google, and then I’d edit and rewrite before and after work. I think I started querying after about a year, convinced it was done. Many rejections later, one agency assistant asked me for a revision, incorporating research. That took another year and by the time I sent it back in 2018, she’d become an editorial assistant at Penguin Press. She invited me for coffee. She gave me notes. I did a revision, and I was going to do one more revision at the start of 2019 before I hit my head and had a life-altering concussion. I took most of 2019 to work on essays, then took time off from my day job when switching companies in 2020 to edit full-time. Through this time, I was still struggling to find an agent and failing. Finally, I was in AWP’s Writer To Writer mentorship program and my mentor, Donna Freitas, helped me nail the revision. I ended up getting three agent offers, picked one, and at the start of 2021, the editor whom I met through querying, Mia Council at Penguin Press, bought the book! It was a long process, but I’m so glad I had time for the book to evolve. One year in, it was totally different, with a “ra-ra go me!” message, that I wouldn’t be proud of today.
Rumpus: In the conclusion, you discuss how you’ve come to accept what happened to you. But can you discuss how the very act of writing is in reaction to not accepting the status quo for kids?
Nietfeld: For as long as I was working on Acceptance, I knew that I wanted that to be the title. But I went through a bunch of iterations of what the word acceptance meant to me. At the beginning, I thought about Acceptance as a defiant, almost ironic title because I had been told by these people who were in power, who were abusing their power, you just need to accept your life. It’s never going to be any better for you. I really hated that and wanted to fight against that.
But then as I got older, and I did go to Harvard and achieve these things, I found that just getting out of my material circumstances wasn’t enough. I wanted to get to a place where I had more inner peace. I battled with these ideas that are so prevalent in American culture that acceptance is the final stage of grief, that we’re okay with what happened to us—forgive and forget. I do not agree with that— that idea strips our experiences of so much of their power, and the ability to change things for people in the future. I really hope that the note that I strike at the end of Acceptance charts a way forward, where I am affected by the things that happened to me—we all are affected by the things that have happened to us in our lives and by injustice and by injustice that we faced—but that that’s okay.
Being affected in those ways can give us motivation to make sure that other people aren’t hurt in the same ways that we’ve been hurt. You can live with that knowledge without having to define your life.
Rumpus: What kind of response have you received from readers who, like you, have lived through seemingly insurmountable circumstances?
Nietfeld: The response has been overwhelming. Even the kind words are a lot to handle. My husband reads them and has them saved for later. One of the most incredible things is hearing from people who have very different lives on the surface. For example, I got a lot of notes from military men! At first, I was puzzled why these guys resonated with a teenage girl’s coming-of-age story. but then I realized that the expectation to be “tough,” no matter what happens, is a burden that particularly weighs on men. It gave me a lot of empathy and made me feel connected to a group that I’d assumed was so different from me. I think that’s what we all hope to get out of writing.
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Author photograph by Zoe Prinds
