Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard
Hardcover – Bargain Price, September 7, 2010
Description
From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. From runaway to Harvard student, Murray tells an engaging, powerfully motivational story about turning her life around after growing up the neglected child of drug addicts. When Murray was born in 1980, her former beatnik father was in jail for illegally trafficking in prescription painkillers, and her mother, a cokehead since age 13, had just barely missed losing custody of their year-old daughter, Lisa. Murray and her sister grew up in a Bronx apartment that gradually went to seed, living off government programs and whatever was left after the parents indulged their drug binges; Murray writes that drugs were the "wrecking ball" that destroyed her family-- prompting her mother's frequent institutionalization for drug-induced mental illness and leading to her parents inviting in sexual molesters. By age 15, with the help of her best friend Sam and an elusive hustler, Carlos, she took permanently to the streets, relying on friends, sadly, for shelter. With the death of her mother, her runaway world came to an end, and she began her step-by-step plan to attend an alternative high school, which eventually led to a New York Times scholarship and acceptance to Harvard. In this incredible story of true grit, Murray went from feeling like "the world was filled with people who were repulsed by me" to learning to receive the bountiful generosity of strangers who truly cared. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist While reading Murray’s memoir, you can’t help but continuously wonder how the young woman narrated on the page could be the same woman who survived to become her author. In the harrowing tale of her childhood in the Bronx, Murray’s straightforward and no-frills prose hits hard. These are the facts, and they are not pretty: Murray watched her parents’ mainline cocaine at the kitchen table from before she could speak, and the family often spent 25 days a month—the time after her parents blew the welfare check to feed their blazing drug habit—starving. Regarding her parents’ addiction with the utmost benevolence, Murray tells of bearing the weighty burden of young protector to her obviously flailing parents, and eventually living on the streets when it was less unhappy—and perhaps safer—than staying at home. With no resources to speak of, she ultimately commits to high school and finds her prospects can be great. Neither sensationalizing nor soliciting pity, Murray’s generous account of and caring attitude toward her past are not only uplifting, but also a fascinating lesson in the value of dedication. --Annie Bostrom Liz Murray completed high school and won a New York Times scholarship while homeless, and graduated from Harvard University in 2009. She has been awarded The White House Project Role Model Award, a Christopher Award, as well as the Chutzpah Award, which was given to Liz by Oprah Winfrey. Lifetime Television produced a film about Liz's life, Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story . Today, she travels the world to deliver motivational speeches and workshops to inspire others. Liz is the founder and director of Manifest Trainings, a New York-based company that empowers adults to create the results they want in their own lives. Read more
Features & Highlights
- "
- Breaking Night
- reads more like an adventure story than an addiction-morality tale. It's a white-knuckle account of survival. . . . By age 6, Murray knew how to mainline drugs (though she never took them) and how to care for her strung-out parents. She showed uncanny maturity, even as a child, and later managed to avoid that malady of teenagers and memoir writers, self-pity. . . . Murray's stoicism has been hard-earned; it serves her well as a writer.
- Breaking Night
- itself is full of heart, without a sliver of ice, and deeply moving." (
- The New York Times Book Review
- )
- "Liz Murray shows us that the human spirit has infinite ability to grow and can never be limited by circumstance.
- Breaking Night
- is a beautifully written, heartfelt memoir that will change the way you look your community, the obstacles in your own life and the American Dream. An inspiration, a must read." (Robert Redford)
- "[Liz Murray] reminds us that the greatest acts of love and failure can occur side by side; that isolation and loss can give way to accomplishment and promise. She offers the awesome hope that, regardless of its past, a life can go beyond endurance and reach for triumph. She leave us with the memory of a child who clung to and refused to surrender the dignity of her soul." (Andrew Bridge, author of the
- New York Times
- bestseller
- Hope's Boy
- )
- "As much as it is a memoir,
- Breaking Night
- is a primer on how poverty and drug abuse create a heartbreaking underclass of children, one that goes largely unnoticed. By the truly uplifting ending, Liz Murray has shown us the worst, and the very best, of America." (Haven Kimmel, author of
- A Girl Named Zippy
- and
- She Got Up Off the Couch
- )
- In the vein of
- The Glass Castle, Breaking Night
- is the stunning memoir of a young woman who at age fifteen was living on the streets, and who eventually made it into Harvard.
- Liz Murray was born to loving but drug-addicted parents in the Bronx. In school she was taunted for her dirty clothing and lice-infested hair, eventually skipping so many classes that she was put into a girls' home. At age fifteen, Liz found herself on the streets when her family finally unraveled. She learned to scrape by, foraging for food and riding subways all night to have a warm place to sleep.
- When Liz's mother died of AIDS, she decided to take control of her own destiny and go back to high school, often completing her assignments in the hallways and subway stations where she slept. Liz squeezed four years of high school into two, while homeless; won a
- New York Times
- scholarship; and made it into the Ivy League.
- Breaking Night
- is an unforgettable and beautifully written story of one young woman's indomitable spirit to survive and prevail, against all odds.
