Review: Breaking Night
Liz Murray's memoir tells a striking Cinderella story of drugs, homelessness, and Harvard
By Kelly Skinner
Published: September 7th, 2010 | 12:01am
Liz Murray’s tale feels like the stuff of a zombie flick: One woman, completely aware of her hopeless surroundings, battles armies of the dead in an apocalyptic landscape strewn with casualties, debris, and grime. She somehow crawls out of the horror scarred, traumatized, and shaken, but ultimately heroic and most importantly, alive. When reading Murray's new memoir, Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard
Growing up in a home with coke-addicted parents who both die of AIDS, dropping out of school at age 16 to fend for herself on the streets, and then proceeding to pull her life together and attend college at Harvard, it’s difficult to grasp that the main character of the story grows into the woman writing the book. Nothing about the writing, the flow of the story, or the characters’ dialogue seems forced or embellished—everything about it reads like the work of a well-seasoned author. Despite the nightmarish imagery of Murray's youth and the memories that haunt her, she treats her readers like close bosom buddies, not as alien creatures with the sort of lives she only ever dreamed of having.
While you feel sorry for her and often morally devastated for her sorrows, Murray moves past traumatic events in waves, allowing her audience to feel the loss and then grow from it like she has. She never blames others for her bad luck even when you most want her to, and in this, her prose remains intoxicating and somewhat otherworldly from beginning to end. You want to meet Murray, be her friend, help her, hold her hand, and then have her teach you how to be more like her. Part of you wonders, would she give me a chance? Would she laugh at how weak I am when compared to what she’s been through?
Yes, it’s often hard to endure passages about a schizophrenic mother who steals her daughter’s birthday money for cocaine. It’s not pretty or fluffy or fun, but Breaking Night is ultimately about hope. As you read about Murray's visits to the hospital to see her mom wither away from AIDS and then head back to the streets to rummage for food, everything in your own life seems to fall into place. Whether her story acts a sort of “if I can do it, you can do it” battle cry amid a tragedy or a "this too shall pass" reality check if you’re simply suffering from a work-week slump, it resonates. Murray's tale is so beautifully told it demands a place beside other difficult-to-read-but-good-for-the-soul books like, Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.
---
ABOUT THE BOOK
Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard
by Liz Murray
Hyperion, September 2010
336 pages
Issue #35
Comments
Want to tell us what you think? Please click here to log in or just click here for quick comments