IN MY SHOES: Harvard, By Way Of Boston Post Road In The Bronx
The Guardian of London tells the inspiring story of Bronx-born Liz Murray, 29, who went from "homeless to Harvard," because her parents were both drug-addled and died of AIDS when she was a teen ("Both my parents were hippies. By the time the early 1980s came around and I'd been born, their disco dancing thing had become a drug habit.") and she wanted something better for herself:
[S]ome of her earliest memories are of her parents spending their welfare payments on cocaine and heroin when she and her sister were starving: "We ate ice cubes because it felt like eating. We split a tube of toothpaste between us for dinner." …
She remembers her mother stealing her birthday money, selling the television, and even the Thanksgiving turkey a church had given them, to scrape together money to score a hit of coke. Liz would turn up to school lice-ridden and was bullied for being smelly and scruffy and eventually dropped out. …
At first she saw herself as a rebel and a victim, but then she had an epiphany. "Like my mother, I was always saying, 'I'll fix my life one day.' It became clear when I saw her die without fulfilling her dreams that my time was now or maybe never," she says.
She had nowhere to live and had not attended school regularly for years, but at 17 pledged to become a "straight A" student and complete her high school education in just two years.
She did a year's work a term and went to night classes. A teacher saw her gumption and mentored her. When he took his top 10 students to Harvard, she stood outside the university and instead of feeling intimidated she admired its architecture – and decided it was within her reach. Then she heard that the New York Times gave scholarships.
Murray graduated from the Ivy League school, and wrote “Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard,” a New York Times bestseller. She is also a motivational speaker, who has been on the same program as such world leaders as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Dalai Lama.
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