The memoir also details homelessness, family dysfunction and the failure of America’s child welfare system.
In high school, Emi Nietfeld won writing awards that earned her local press coverage.It sounds great on the surface, but the story as she writes about it was anything but. Nietfeld’s parents split when she was young, her father, who came out as trans, was largely absent from her life, while she describes her mother as a hoarder with mental health issues. Nietfeld got caught up in the child welfare system, which ranged from cruel and indifferent to brutal.
Q. Did you start out writing a more straightforward family dysfunction memoir or were you always interested in exposing the flaws in the system and society that made your situation so much worse? I felt a lot of pressure to end the book smiling in Harvard Yard, being so happy and grateful and making everything worth it. That was impossible — there’s no way to make things that should not have happened OK. That’s a big fallacy we have as a society that is super dangerous.
The writing was really about all the larger systems that were shaping our interactions and trying to make that known to the reader without distracting from the immediacy of the story. Q. As an adult, you learn through research that your brother wanted to take you in but your mother undermined it and no one in the system tried to help. And you had a loving mentor who also wanted to but was forbidden by the rules.
When I was homeless or tentatively housed, I felt I was always vulnerable — if somebody decided to hurt me they could and would. This blame is really common to survivors of sexual assault, but it has a different flavor when you have teenagers who are on their own.
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