And now...a respite from politics: "Breaking Night," by Liz Murray - Granite Grok

And now…a respite from politics: “Breaking Night,” by Liz Murray

I always jot down mini-reviews of books when I finish them. Don’t know how many I have. Only got into the habit in the 1980’s or ’90’s. None of the real important ones are there—Atlas Shrugged, Economics in One Lesson, Power and Market, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—but most of them for the past 20 years or so. But life has a way of filling up every nook and cranny, so you don’t have much time to read. I don’t like that. So I figure one of my New Year’s Resolutions (oh come on, they’re fun, not serious…even if they are carried through on) will be to read more. Dont’ know where I’m going to find the time. But I’ll do it.

What made me make this resolution? The book I just finished. Michele gave it to me for Christmas, inscribing it on the front "No more wondering!" because I occasionally ask "I wonder how that girl is doing who lived homeless in New York and eventually went to Harvard? What was her name….?" Her name is Liz Murray, and I couldn’t put her autobiography down. It’s just come out. It’s a best-selling hardback over 300 pages long. And I just finshed it in less than 48 hours.

Here’s what it’s about. Here’s my min-review….

BREAKING NIGHT, by Liz Murray (hardback, 529 page; given to me around 10:30 a.m., Saturday morning, Dec. 25, 2010, by Michele; finished reading 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 26, 2010.

          This is a book accompanied by tears. And yet, many parts of it are read dry-eyed—not because the narrative fails to engender grief—but because the dread descriptions of what the author lived through as a young girl are stated so matter-of-factly that tears would seem anomalous, even impertinent.

          Liz Murray, now age 29, lived in the 1980’s and early 90’s in New York city with loving but drug-addicted parents. Her mother was mentally ill. She saw and experienced as a young child hopelessness, danger, near-starvation, and constant trepidation. Living in the streets of New York, homeless from age 13 to 18, Murray writes with a complete absence of self-pity, unfolding instead a story ultimately about kindness, inspiration and love in the face of hopelessness, hardship, disappointment and endless grief.

          Putting pen to paper in her 18th year, Murray wrote an essay to apply for a prestigious New York Times scholarship: "I held my pen to the paper, trembling. I worked in some kind of trance, pouring everything I had onto that page. My frustrations, my sadness, all of my grief, they pushed the pen across that page…."

As young girls, Murray and her older sister Lisa sometimes struggled not to starve: Welfare money meant to last a month was sucked up in a week by the drugs both of her parents mainlined, leaving nothing to buy food. By the age of six, Murray knew the particulars of how to wrap a strap around one’s arm, find a vein, and inject it with a reused needle. How could she not? As a child she watched her parents do this repeatedly. By age 13 she was on the street. At 15 her mother died of AIDS. Miraculously, she survived; ultimately, she triumphed.

          Liz Murray’s story is worthy of a river…nay, an ocean of tears, and through her childhood shed them all. Even near the end, when through  personal persistence and endurance she was about to be admitted to Harvard University—after completing four years of high school in two years while living homeless on the streets of New York—she wrote that "Underneath all the achievement and bustle of my life was a heartbreaking catalog of losses." Her father giving her up to a state institution; her mother dying of AIDs alone in a sterile hospital room; living for years homeless on the streets of New York, including "nights spent alone in a staircase, wondering how long it would take anyone to notice if I disappeared." At the end, she writes, "I tasted the salt of my tears, let them flow, felt the places in my heart that were the most broken, and I finally allowed myself the space to mourn. I cried until I no longer had to."

          The book is a deeply moving account of a girl’s story of survival, determination, and above all love, in a world where none would appear possible, much less expected. In the book’s Epilogue Murray writes "One thing I know for sure: homeless person or business person, doctor or teacher, whatever your background may be, the same holds true for each of us: life takes on the meaning that you give it."

(Today Liz Murray is the founder and director of Manifest Living, a New York-based organization designed to "empower adults to create the extraordinary in their own lives.")

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