“I could escape into my ambition”: On Emi Nietfeld’s “Acceptance”
Emi Nietfeld | Acceptance: A Memoir | Penguin Press | 2022 | 365 Pages
In recent years, non-fiction publishing trends have graced the earth’s commuters with a steady diet of proto-political memoirs from authors who rose from economic instability to occupy more-or-less esteemed positions in professional society. The two cornerstone examples of such train-reads are JD Vance’s 2016 Hillbilly Elegy and Tara Westover’s 2018 Educated, which was heralded as the former’s liberal-minded antidote.
These books are both, on some level, fables of ambition which seek to redeem the fast-spreading experience of American precarity by demonstrating its connection (however dubious) to professional culture. On another, they function to lend out their own troubled origin stories as vindication to a set of already-circulating professional class beliefs.
Emi Nietfeld’s Acceptance—out August 2 from Penguin Press—is the latest debutant in this milieu, although it is of a higher order and a very different stripe. The story carries its author from a tumultuous childhood in Minnesota—in which a burst tech stock bubble sends her family’s savings south, a childhood divorce leaves her in the throes of a custody battle, and medical complications abound—through to what looks, from the outside, like a dream life: a marriage to an accomplished young man from a good family, a diploma from Harvard University, and a high-paying job at Google.
Perhaps more akin to Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, the movement of Acceptance is less toward self-actualization than self-knowledge. Nietfeld’s narrative retrospectively interrogates her own struggle to manifest a self in spite of contradictory identities. She is a bible quiz champion who dons fishnets; a poor Midwesterner in the Ivy League; a bookish-type who studies software (strangely because she sees it as more “inclusive” than literature classes); a professional striver whose true vocation lies in the duties of family and the comforts of home; and, finally, a woman with an at-times fierce attraction to other women who marries a college boyfriend.
In her formative years, when anxiety over these competing identities rears its head, it is broadly subsumed into a monomaniacal idea of life-progress. “I could escape into my ambition”, she confesses early on, shortly after saying “I’d organized my life so that I never had more than fifteen minutes free for everything I’d overcome to come back to haunt me.” These are Nietfeld’s first clues that her narrative is a reaction against the repressive qualities of her own ambition. And her book is an escape from this escape.
Looking back from a vista of professional security, somewhere on the far side of her own ambition, Nietfeld writes to survey the tumultuous psychological landscape of class mobility. In breaking from the Cinderella-story convention of social mobility memoirs, Acceptance achieves exceptional candor and beauty.
Conditioned by her experience of childhood volatility—spent living “always one step away from tragedy”—every occasion of achievement in the book is underwritten by a monumental fear that things could have, and still might, turn out otherwise. For instance, after she is married, Neitfeld’s fears about her relationship reach an almost primordial pitch. “After we married, I feared he’d divorce me. In my nightmares, I was chased, kidnapped, and institutionalized, or I had to fuck a row of men for cash… I never forgot that only three highly correlated things had to happen for me to be out on the street: becoming disabled, getting sued, or having Byron leave me.”
What’s more, it is precisely in the moment she receives a life-altering job offer from Google that she is “haunted” by “narrowly avoided fates”. “Still, part of me couldn’t stop thinking about how, in so many other versions of my life, I’d spend the next who-knows-how-many years struggling to pay off debt… Harvard had changed my life. But the fates I narrowly avoided haunted me.”
It is an important, if tragic, trope in Nietfeld’s memoir that moments of achievement—and the attendant stability they promise—generate a dizzying awareness of the precarity—even the absurdity—of one’s position. The tragedy deepens when one realizes that these outcomes are the product of one’s own behavior, even one’s own will. This phenomenon is near the heart of Acceptance and was, it is often suggested, the condition of its production.
Somewhere not far beneath these accounts of personal, academic, professional, and psychological trials, there runs a vital undercurrent of pity for those among her peers who had it easy. Directly implicated are Nietfeld’s Harvard classmates (whose “destiny” was her “wildest dream”), and, in some instances, her husband; indirectly implicated are the city-bound readers who open these kinds of books on the train.
In evincing this pity, Acceptance wins for itself independence from the sentimental identification of the professional reader. “I had spent my young adulthood desperate for redemption, striving to make everything that happened “for the best’”, she writes, near the close of her memoir, “It would only be a good story, I believed, if it had the happiest ending. I had to take tragedy and twist it into triumph.”
Never does a reader suspect that Nietfeld is smuggling, along with a personal narrative, a coming-of-age story for a hazy set of social ideals that are vindicated by her strife. The drama in this narrative is an uphill battle waged on the path to personhood, an individual coming to blows with truths that cannot be squared with the striver plot of her own life. Harvard gave Neitfeld “a special voice that I used on the phone”; in Acceptance, she learns to speak for herself.