Book: Breaking Night by Liz Murray

A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard.

Liz and her sister Lisa grew up with parents who were hard-core drug abusers. They lived in New York City. There is one B & W photo of her mother who looks a bit like Janis Joplin but with dark hair. Her parents used drugs intravenously every day.

"A man had beaten Daddy's head into the cement just down the block...and it had taken him almost an hour to stagger home. But by the very next day, Daddy was out of the house again, copping drugs. Like Ma, has addiction was so strong that he gambled his safety night after night....he climbed the stairs to smooth out Ma's crinkled dollar bills, giving them over to the drug dealer in exchange for the packages of powder that ruled my parents' world."

Liz grew up somehow but almost never went to school. For years and years she ran the streets with her street family, a group of friends who cared for her and she for them. Many also had compromised lives but they struggled together, helped each other and were her salvation. She became adept at avoiding trunacy officials, at working off and on in marginal non-official capacities, at doing everything she could to help her mother. For a long, long time, their dirty disorganized apartment was a haven for her. Her parents would occasionally emerge from their drug hazes, and there would be a semblance of normalcy and love that sufficed for Liz. She became their protectors, especially looking out for her mother, watching from the window at night for her to stagger home from the bar.

But then her Ma gets sick with AIDS and also has periodic mental breakdowns requiring hospitalizations. She would return home and be clean and sober for short periods of time, but always quickly relapsed. Her mother sold herself for drugs and finally moved in with a brutish man named Brick, off IV drugs but not off alcohol.

Liz finally is forced to live on the streets, on park benches, sleeping in subway cars, on landings in friends' apartment buildings, or hidden in friends' rooms, arriving after a parent had gone to bed and leaving before they got up. She stole food to survive; she was dirty and tattered and cold and hungry much of the time. And then, at age 17 with ONE high-school credit to her name, she hears about Humanities Preparatory Academy and gets accepted, although this meant, among other hurdles, that her Dad needed to sign papers to register her. Her mother had died and her Dad was living in a shelter by this time, but he comes to the school and fills out the papers.

And as they leave the school:

"He didn't ask questions, and I hoped it would stay that way. What I was avoiding in every way possible, was for him to know what I was really going through. Because if he found out, I knew it would hurt him. Then he'd be living in a shelter and worrying about me too. Then I'd worry about him worrying about me, and what good would that do either of us?" An amazing and poignant reaction to a man who had done so little to nurture his daughter. That she had the wisdom at age 17 to accept and forgive and love her parents is also why Liz' story is remarkable. Seldom is this the case with such messed up parents.

Liz perseveres and does go to Harvard and eventually she has her Dad move in with her and some friends in Cambridge.

"Just a month before Daddy died, Ed and I took him a on long-awaited trip to San Farncisco...Ed and I just followed Daddy to his favorite spots: Haight-Ashbury, Alcatraz, and his beloved City Lights Bookstore..."

He died 3 weeks later; he too had AIDS, but had been 8 years sober by then.

One's heart aches for Liz and her sister and even for her pathetic addicted parents, but this is a compelling story of the human spirit, determination, discipline and love emerging from chaos.