Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard

“That was the summer of 1985, just before school, and the last time I can remember the four of us being so close, and happy. Before then, whatever went on in our household, I simply had nothing to compare it to. I had no idea how different we could be from other people.”

When Liz writes this, she acknowledges that there’s a potential for isolation in her life that she wasn’t aware of until she went to school.

“While Ma spoke, I abandoned my needs—sleep, homework, television, and my toys, unused in my darkened bedroom. Her pain blanketed me in its urgency, so that it became difficult to realize that there was any distance—age-wise or responsibility-wise—between us.”

Liz puts everything aside to help her mother because she knows her mother needs help and because her mother’s pain feels more urgent than her own needs. This is one of many occasions in Breaking Night when Liz stresses the urgency of a need. Usually, that need refers to a means of physical survival, such as food. But helping her mother, and connecting with her mother, becomes a pathway for emotional survival for Liz and therefore trumps other urgent needs.

“I told Ma all but one detail—the fact that I knew it was wrong. I knew that all I had to do to end it was call out for her. But I didn’t, because Ron made things better for Ma, for Lisa and me. I didn’t want to ruin that, so I failed to call out.”

As a childhood victim of sexual abuse, Liz unsurprisingly has difficulty admitting that she knew what Ron was doing was wrong, or stopping him. He’s the adult in the situation; he’s the authority figure. Later, when Carlos starts behaving violently toward Liz, she’s much older but initially has the same difficulty because he’s made himself the authority figure in their interactions and relationship.Ultimately, Liz frees herself from that later situation.

“Any joy I managed outside of our home felt, to me, like a form of betrayal.”

Liz writes this about her time spent with Rick and Danny, particularly while at their home, where she was able to share in a nutritious meal. Beyond that, she was welcomed into their family and therefore also shared in their love for one another. Because of her guilt, she didn’t tell her family about her time at Rick and Danny’s.

“A couple nights later when our stomachs finally ached from hunger, and it became too awkward to knock on 1A and ask for leftovers again, Lisa and I split a tube of toothpaste and a cherry-flavored ChapStick when we got hungry.”

Liz’s admission to what she and Lisa resorted to eating just to fill their stomachs shows their desperation, as neither toothpaste nor ChapStick has any nutritional value.

“What was my sister thinking? What apartment had she woken up in every morning? If we went days without a solid meal, why would it matter if we wanted to look up the Peloponnesian War, or what year Abe Lincoln was born?”

When Liz writes this about Lisa, she’s frustrated that her sister called the Encyclopedia Britannica sales number and invited Matt into their apartment. Not only is Liz embarrassed by the state of the apartment and her mother’s mental state, but she also feels disconnected from Lisa because Lisa is focused on non-immediate needs, while Liz is wondering when they’ll eat a full meal—or even a morsel—again.

“Though he wasn’t my friend, I admired how Kevin had found a way to do things on his own, how he looked at not having money—a situation that most people would see as fixed—as something he could overcome. What else wasn’t set in stone? I wondered what other opportunities were out there for me.”

When Liz explores this idea of untapped and endless opportunity, she’s foreshadowing the empowerment she ultimately discovers and embraces at the end of Breaking Night. Even at a young age, she recognizes it in Kevin, even if she doesn’t know how to claim it for herself yet. She starts to, but after she goes into the system, she feels less independent, reliant on Brick and then on Carlos.

“Just because I was active and enjoyed being physical, I didn’t see why this got me compared to a boy. Yet I felt nothing like the girls who wore frilly dresses that left them sitting motionless, legs folded, gossiping on chairs and other clean surfaces all day long.”

There are many layers of meaning in this quote. Liz feels close to her father because she’s a tomboy, but she also wants to feel close to Lisa, who is not a tomboy and enjoys those things she describes at the end of the quote, things that girls are typically associated with. There’s an identity crisis here because she can’t figure out where she fits on the gender spectrum at this age. Finally, she feels isolated because she can’t identify with either end of that spectrum.

“‘Why don’t people just leave before it comes?’ I asked. Ma stared again out into the alley. ‘They would if they knew when to expect it, but they can’t. It takes them by surprise, and then it’s too late to get away. I’m going to get some sleep now, pumpkin. I’m tired.’ ‘But Ma, no matter how fast they run?’ ‘No matter how fast they run, Lizzy. Once they see it coming, it’s already too late to escape.’”

This conversation between Liz and Jeanie (started by Liz) is about the tsunami, which is a symbol for addiction and for the inevitability of death. Jeanie wants to quit using drugs, but she can’t because it’s too late, just like the people who see the tsunami but don’t have the opportunity to escape it.

“I just needed to have life around me—the pulse and vibration of people out in the world doing things.”

Liz provides this reason for her truancy, but while it may be partially true, it’s important for the reader to remember that she is horribly bullied at school at this point, and she also wants to spend all of her available hours with her mother. These are also reasons for her skipping school at first, though she spends less time with her mother as she skips school more and more.

“You need to get to school, Elizabeth. If you don’t go, I’m going to take you; it’s as simple as that. Your mother told me she sends you to school and you don’t go. Well, that needs to change. And you and your sister need to help your mother out and clean up this mess. Tell Lisa that. I mean it. This house is disgusting, and absolute pigsty.”

Ms. Cole, the representative from Child Welfare Services, says this to Liz in regard to her truancy. Not only does she threaten her with removal from her family, her home, and everything she knows, but she also passes judgment on the quality of the home. The reader has, by now, determined that the home is indeed a mess, but by this point in the story is asked to sympathize with Liz and to desire to bolster her against Ms. Cole’s verbal attacks.

“Something had stolen away the affection between Ma and me and reduced our interactions to casual, distant ones. Since her diagnosis two years ago, our dynamic hadn’t been the same.”

Liz’s recognition of this shift precedes her mother’s untimely passing. She’s already said goodbye in a way by distancing herself emotionally, perhaps in an unconscious effort to lessen the grief of the physical loss when it happens later on.

“And when I was being honest with myself, despite tremendous efforts not to admit it, the knowledge of her disease made me want to avoid her, too. Being in Ma’s presence was being near the disease, near the knowledge that I was fast losing my mother—information that was just too painful to feel.”

When Liz writes this, she’s acknowledging her honest reaction to her mother’s illness. Not only is it painful for her to see her mother wasting away, but she feels helpless. Whenever Jeanie would come home drunk or whenever she would get high, Liz was able to help her in some way. When her mother was sad, Liz could comfort her. But faced with HIV, Liz feels hopeless and therefore helpless.

“Sex was something you do with someone else, yet you can experience it separately from each other. It didn’t necessarily bring you closer. In fact, it could highlight the parts of you that feel most separate. Sex could reveal to you your own isolation.”

Liz writes this about her first sexual experience with Carlos. Not only had Sam built her hopes up by telling her that sex makes participants feel closer and more in love with one another, but Carlos made no efforts to see to his partner’s pleasure. Liz’s disillusionment touches on one of the major themes of Breaking Night—isolation. She’d once felt so close to Carlos, so similar to him, but now she feels far apart from him.

“I looked at Carlos, and for a second he became as much a stranger as the day I first met him—mysterious, slippery. But when he smiled, he somehow reversed it and became familiar all over again.”

When Liz says this, she accomplishes two things: she shows Carlos’s mercurial nature and she relates his behavior (and her reaction) to her parents’ drug use and her mother’s psychotic episodes, which caused her parents to become by turns familiar and strange to her.

“Maybe you could be a prostitute without knowing it, I thought. Maybe all it took was compromising yourself for the sake of gaining something in return. I was sick of my dependence on Carlos, tired of our sick lifestyle.”

Liz realizes finally that her relationship with Carlos has become toxic and that she needs to end it in order to preserve herself. This realization, that she has traded security and what she thought of as safety for sharing a bed with Carlos helps her finally break away from him.

“All I cared about in those moments were Ma, Lisa, and Daddy. The gravity of our loss washed away the pettiness of everything else.”

When Liz writes these two sentences, she’s acknowledging how the pain of grief can bring a family together —or at least make one want to bring one’s family together. The arguments she has had with Lisa and the feelings of abandonment she has felt due to her father’s actions mean nothing when all she wants is to grieve with them.

“People see pearls as beautiful, perfect gems, but never realize that they actually come from pain—from something hard or dangerous getting trapped inside an oyster where it doesn’t belong. The oyster makes a pearl to protect itself.”

Liz writes this to her mother as an acknowledgment that not everything beautiful comes from bliss, and that pain and danger can also yield growth that is beautiful.

“Life has a way of doing that; one minute everything makes sense, the next, things change. People get sick. Families break apart, your friends could close the door on you.”

Here, Liz is starting to come into the central realization of this memoir—that she cannot control everything in her life and therefore must forgive herself and others in order to grow. In this short quote, she touches on the unpredictability of life, and on one of the few constants: that a person can only control their own decisions and actions.

“I see where you’re coming from, Perry, and I really appreciate your help…but I want to graduate high school. It’s just something I have to do.”

Liz says this to her future teacher, Perry, while interviewing at Prep. He has suggested a GED, but Liz knows her mother wanted her to graduate from high school. Not only is this something she needs to do for herself, it’s something she feels she must do for her mother’s memory.

“I could tell she was a kind woman. You could see it in the way she reached for her son and in the way he softened to her. Watching them, I felt like I did when watching a movie I’d snuck into at Loews Paradise; like at any moment I might get caught and asked to leave, my presence discovered as fraudulent.”

When Liz says this about Ken and his mother, she feels as though a wall separates her and people like her from everyone else. She feels like a voyeur, watching something without permission, participating in an open and loving parent-child relationship to which she does not belong.

“This was the environment in which I finally came to my education, the environment in which I knew I could no longer lie in bed and give up. How could I pull the blanket back over my head when I knew my teachers were waiting for me? When they were willing to work so hard, how could I not do the same?”

Here, Liz explainsthe revelation that enables her to pursue her high school diploma. She realizes that her teachers are willing to help her but that she has to be willing to at least meet them halfway. There’s also a metaphor worth noting—that of refusing to pull the blanket over her head—that demonstrates Liz’s unwillingness to remain oblivious to the wide world around her, and to replace that obliviousness with education.

“In the years ahead of me, I learned that the world is actually filled with people ready to tell you how likely something is, and what it means to be realistic. But what I have also learned is that no one, no one truly knows what is possible until they go and do it.”

Liz says this after she interviews for the scholarship from New York Times. It’s the next Friday when she discovers that she has been awarded the money. It’s also when her life changes drastically, since it is the scholarship that earns her national support and ultimately, international recognition.