Acceptance: A Memoir

"Throughout her traumatic adolescence, author Emi Nietfeld clung to the dream of getting into an Ivy League university as a means of escape. She grew up with a mother who was a hoarder, endured stints in a residential treatment facility and foster care, and was homeless while on breaks from boarding school. She did get into Harvard University and had a job offer in hand from Google upon graduation. But Acceptance isn’t a phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes tale, and for precisely this reason it’s a must-read. Instead, the memoir refuses silver linings and serves as a necessary corrective to the gospel of “grit.”"