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

The narrator, Liz,shares the story of how her mother revealed to her father that she was expecting a baby: from the other side of a glass partition while visiting him in prison. Liz describes how her mother left an abusive home at the age of thirteen, and started using drugs. She supported her addiction with odd jobs and prostitution, but wanted to be a court stenographer. Her father’s father was an abusive and violent man who abandoned Liz’s father after his wife divorced him. Despite that, Liz’s father went to an elite private school—but that is also where he began using drugs. Because of this, he stopped applying himself to college and started applying himself to selling drugs.

Liz’s parents started living together in 1977 and had their first child, Lisa, in 1978. Then, a scheme to sell illegal pain medicine landed Liz’s parents in trouble with the Feds. By that point, Liz’s mother, Jeanie, was pregnant with Liz, and because she was pregnant,the judge took pity on her, and she was saved from serving a sentence in prison. In September of 1980, Liz was born with drugs in her system, but otherwise healthy. This marked a new beginning for Liz’s family, with her mother striving for sobriety. After Liz’s father was released from prison, the positive changes her mother had made began to slip away, along with her sobriety.

Liz says that the day the welfare check comes is her favorite day every week because she has two important jobs: watching for the mailman and counting how many people stand in line before her and her mother at the place where they cash their check. As time goes on, the relationship between her older sister, Lisa, and their parents deteriorates. Their parents blame this on the fact that Lisa was fostered by a well-to-do family while their mother was pregnant with Liz.

Liz tells her pious grandmother that she wants to be a comedian when she grows up, but her grandmother wants her to be a live-in maid, so she can get meals for free, live with a nice family, and practice for marriage. Liz decides to agree on the outside, but still pursue her own plans.Liz’s mom starts drinking regularly as Liz prepares mentally to start school for the first time. The family spends the fourth of July setting off fireworks with neighbors

Now in the first grade, Liz has gotten lice, and her sister, Lisa, promises a cure. She braids Liz’s hair and fills it with red things, stating that the bugs fear the color—but only two of them jump off into the bath. It’s then that Liz discovers that Lisa was playing a practical joke on her. At school, she’s made fun of for the short, spikey bangs her mother cut in her hair, for the fact that she’s often dirty and smells bad, and for the lice, which she got from the basement of her apartment building, where she accompanied her mother, who went there to get drugs. Liz’s grades slip as she stays awake all night to monitor her parents, whom she doesn’t blame for their neglect on account of their drug addictions.

Jeanie (Liz’s mother) does whatever she can to obtain drugs. She prostitutes herself and steals Liz’s birthday money—five dollars sent by her grandmother. Liz forgives her and helps her dad sneak past Lisa’s room to score more drugs, because they both know it will make Lisa angry if she finds out. When school gets worse for Liz, she convinces her mother to let her stay home, but after a few weeks of this, two strangers come to investigate her truancy. They pass a message under the door, which Liz rips up and throws away without her parents knowing.

Jeanie makes a new friend named Tara, who has a daughter named Stephanie. Stephanie has behavioral issues, such as frequent temper tantrums. Tara and Jeanie get high while their children play together, and eventually, Tara introduces Jeanie to her friend Ron. Ron is in his sixties, buys drugs for Tara and Jeanie, and takes them and the kids out for lunch at IHOP. One day, Jeanie, Lisa, and Liz go alone with Ron to his house and, after Jeanie goes out, Ron forces the two girls to bathe in front of him. When Jeanie later has a mental breakdown and Lisa and Liz are taken by family services, Liz reveals that Ron sexually abused her. She feels violated again when family services examines her on suspicions that her father has also abused her.

Four years pass between Chapters Two andThree, during which time Jeanie experiences six schizophrenic episodes that land her in the hospital. Her drug abuse gets worse while she’s home in between hospital stays, and Peter’s drug use decreases as the responsibility to care for Lisa and Liz falls to him. However, during the summer of 1990, both parents experience an eight-month binge that changes Liz’s life. Liz reveals that Peter has another daughter, named Meredith, whom he abandoned when she was just two years old and that, during one of Jeanie’s hospitalizations, Jeanie and Lisa met Meredith. Meredith’s existence, on top ofthe eight-month drug binge, causes Liz to doubt Peter.

Liz starts leaving home a lot, and befriends two boys from the neighborhood, Rick and Danny Hernandez. They become her surrogate family; she doesn’t tell them about her biological family, and vice versa. One day, Jeanie is in the midst of another psychotic break when an Encyclopedia Britannica salesman named Matt arrives, having been called by Lisa, who wanted the two complimentary volumes of the encyclopedia (which she never ends up getting). Liz is embarrassed by her mother’s behavior and by the state of their apartment.

Liz starts hustling along with Rick, Danny, and their friend Kevin. They pump gas for people even though they don’t work for the gas station. Liz buys a happy meal from McDonald’s for herself, and at home, marvels at Lisa’s use of a bra. Jeanie and Liz have a heart-to-heart during which Jeanie describes tsunamis and then tells Liz that she has AIDS. Liz becomes angry at herself and destroys the Charlotte’s Web diorama she had created for a school assignment. She’d spent all afternoon and the better part of the evening perfecting it, in hopes that she’d win an award from the school library.