Her doctor told her that she could just choose to be well or to be sick “and get locked up for a nice long time.” But it didn’t make her any better, given the fact that her illness was not a “bad behavior” to fix, as she writes, but a condition compounded by a difficult home life. Later, Nietfeld was hospitalized at age 14 for anorexia at the Methodist Hospital Eating Disorder Institute. They lived in a duplex in Minnesota where “the stench of mouse pee permeated every room.” Her hoarder mother was given full custody while her father, who changed her name to Michelle, seemed to have completely disappeared from her life. In 2002, when Nietfeld was 10, her father came out as trans in days before the gender identity was well known, and her parents divorced. In the probing narrative, through revisiting the hardships of the first 20 years of her life, Nietfeld questions the assumptions that survival should depend on personal excellence. The book has been praised by New York Times bestselling author Bruce Feiler as “this generation’s “Prozac Nation.”” The Southern Review of Books called it “a gripping, urgent memoir in an era when social mobility feels beset from all sides.” The young East Villager’s memoir, published this past summer, chronicles her journey from foster care and homelessness to Harvard on a full scholarship and then on to a job in Big Tech.

It was hard to picture her as the high school “disaster bisexual” portrayed in her memoir.

Her cheeks flushed in the sun, as she joked about the culture of iced coffee and her plan later to watch “Saturday Night Live” with her husband on the new sofa they bought together. She wore a black knit top that highlighted a round, golden-pendant necklace, her hair combed behind her head and held by a hair clip.

Nietfeld, a 30-year-old former Google software engineer, was sitting outside her favorite East Village coffee shop, Ninth Street Espresso, where she wrote most of her buzzy memoir, “Acceptance” (Penguin). “This is the identity marker that I needed when I was in high school,” she said. BY YUYAN LU | The first time Emi Nietfeld heard the term “disaster bisexuals,” she thought it was made up.

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