The ObserverBiography books This article is more than 13 years oldReviewBreaking Night by Liz Murray – review
This article is more than 13 years oldThe neglected daughter of two drug addicts, Liz Murray has made a thinking woman's misery memoir of her journey from homelessness to HarvardThis book is presented in misery memoir tradition: a little girl lost on its cover, its author's name in gold and a title that boasts Breaking Night: The Astonishing True Story of Courage, Survival and Overcoming All the Odds. It is already a bestseller in the US and one can see, at a glance, that it will appeal to the market that has made bestsellers of its more abject rivals – Dave Pelzer's A Child Called "It" and all its gruelling successors (the genre could be dubbed: "Children called Them"). However, this book, one guesses, even before reading it, looks likely to stand head and shoulders above the rest, because Liz Murray is remarkable – a special case. She went to Harvard when she was homeless and so this will, at the very least, be a thinking woman's misery memoir.
Her story can be told briefly or unspooled at length (the book's 400 pages would have been as powerful cut by half). Murray is the daughter of drug addicts who died of Aids. They neglected her, scandalously, but loved her in their own hopelessly dysfunctional way. By the age of six she was accustomed to watching her parents shoot up (her mother was almost blind, so her father had to help her do it). She left home at 15, carrying with her a crumpled snapshot of her mother, taken at a similar age – a girl with a storm cloud of hair and an unnervingly absent stare. It is the only picture reproduced in the book – her talisman. No wonder Murray preferred the photo to the reality.
Murray's mother was dying of Aids while her daughter rode the subways at night for warmth, slept in stairwells on marble floors, camped in friends' houses, scavenged in rubbish bins and played truant from school. Murray fell into a relationship with a teenage coke dealer – slippery and charismatic – who put her up in a series of dodgy motels. But remarkably, by focusing on her parents' bad example, she managed to avoid drugs herself. And, at 17, she motivated herself to return to high school – making up a year's work with every term. It was not the role of friends, she suddenly understood, to pay her rent. Murray set herself the highest goals and won a New York Times scholarship that led to the place at Harvard. Now she devotes herself to running her own company, Manifest Living, which "empowers" others to change their lives.
It is an extraordinary achievement and the book is an absorbing, pacy, disturbing read. One feels Murray has placed herself, through her story, beyond reproach. Yet there are problems. The first is that the book conforms to a stereotypical structure: the rags-to-riches or, in this case, hobo‑to-Harvard model. The prose itself is smart, fluent and relentlessly spry. It has one wondering: who was Liz Murray before she learned to write? Some writers choose a parental tone to describe the children they once were. Murray has the steadiness of a social worker, remembering her past from the safety of a better place. She goes conscientiously through the motions of telling us what she felt, but the vulnerability and chaos of her life – and its tragedies – are held at one remove by the narrative's organised structure. This prose is self-protective.
And for all the author's efforts, one is left with no precise idea of who her parents were. This is not her fault – drugs rob people of character, blur their edges. What's more, her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and in and out of mental hospital. I picture her mother as a contemporary version of a pitiful Tennessee Williams heroine, especially at the point when she leaves Murray's father and moves into the apartment of "Brick", a cloakroom attendant – fat, lascivious and ordinary. She is dazzled by his attentions. After her mother's death, Murray writes her a studiedly lyrical letter: "You and me, Ma, reminds me of how pearls are made. People see pearls as beautiful, perfect gems, but never realize that they actually come from pain…" The strange thing is that, however genuine, the posthumous correspondence rings false; the imagery won't take the strain. It makes one speculate on the difficulty of being comprehensively truthful about a complicated relationship.
More moving is the moment when, some time after her mother has been diagnosed with Aids, they sit together with two dandelion clocks and silently make their wishes. The likelihood that they are making the same wish is obvious – and as futile as the stopping of time.
Murray's father had a gift for irony and an appetite for books (stolen from the library), and a talent for fishing second-hand treasure from rich people's rubbish bins. She describes this plunder in detail: a broken pink hair-dryer for her sister, a fancy glass box for her mother, a filthy toy truck for herself.
By far the most memorable stretches of the book are those describing the squalid particulars of the family flat in the Bronx. By the time you have envisaged the coffee table strewn with her mother's knickers, her parents' blood on the walls and the Wonder Bread, the lice having a field day on her head, you are desperate to read about scouring, clean water and gallons of shampoo. Murray describes hunger vividly, too – she and her sister, on one occasion, share toothpaste and a cherry flavoured chapstick to keep them going. At every turn, what one salutes is Murray's unjudgmental stoicism, her compassion and lack of self-pity. One gets the sense she has spent her life trying not to rock the boat – and is still aiming for calm waters. She won't let misery win. Yet wisely, she never attempts to suppress just how boring drug addicts are. This has its own grim power.
In the end, the greatest problem with the book has nothing to do with the writing – it is about one's motivation in reading on. There is shame attached to the comfortable process of reading at another's expense. There is nothing wrong with sympathetic understanding of another's misfortune, but something base about the comparative revelling in being clean, well-fed and sheltered. Murray's intention is that her book will empower readers to think differently about their lives, and perhaps it will. But the unqualified happy ending, with its American insistence on the omnipotence of positive thinking, makes one uneasy. Don't tell me Liz Murray's story – or anyone else's – is that simple.
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