30 pages • 1 hour read
Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Sam and Liz spend the night outside and then make their way to Bobby’s apartment. They know that his mother leaves early for work, so they wait until they see her leave and then go in. Inside the apartment, they both shower and use Bobby’s mother’s makeup and deodorant. Then, Sam cuts off almost all of her long hair in a symbolic break from her family. Her father had liked her to grow it long, so this is an act of rebellion. Liz helps her shave most of it off in a show of emotional support.
More and more, they spend time with Carlos. The trio hustles for food, cash, and places to sleep. They stay at friends’ apartments, and Liz notices that Carlos has many friends. He also knows a lot of girls, but won’t introduce them to Liz or Sam, even when they all meet on the street.
Liz turns sixteen and her friends get her a Carvel ice cream cake to celebrate. Despite her happiness to be with them, her birthday highlights her isolation and makes her realize how much she misses her family and how much she wants Jeanie and Peter to get back together so that the four of them can live in the same apartment again.
Carlos comes and goes a lot and won’t tell Liz or Sam where he’s been. Liz starts to doubt that she and Sam can rely on him, but then he returns with hundreds and hundreds of dollars. At first, Liz thinks he’s claimed his inheritance, but then a part of her wonders if that inheritance was made up or real. She starts to have nightmares about her mother starving.
Chapter 8 Summary
Carlos takes Liz and Sam to a motel, where they clean up. Liz wants to ask Carlos about where he’s going, who he’s talking to on the phone, and why he leaves for so long without so much of a promise that he’ll return. Instead, she only manages to ask him about getting an apartment. He shows her a newspaper with apartments circled in the classified section, and some phone numbers written in the margins. Feeling mollified, Liz cheers up, and the three of them go out on the town to celebrate Carlos’s windfall.
Afterward, Sam goes to visit Oscar, and Liz and Carlos stay behind at the motel. There, they have sex for the first time. Liz has been expecting, from Sam’s description, that sex will be a deeply meaningful experience. However, all she feels is separate. Carlos starts spending his money and becomes authoritative, especially with Liz. She starts to fear him and to suspect that he’s either dealing drugs or cheating on her—or both.
One night, she picks up the newspaper and calls one of the phone numbers he had jotted down in the margin. A woman on the other end of the line picks up and Liz learns that the number is for a bar, not a leasing office. Liz realizes that Carlos never intended to get an apartment for the three of them to live in.
On Thanksgiving, Liz sees her grandmother and realizes the motel they’ve been crashing in is right next to her grandmother’s nursing home. She feels guilty for not being the granddaughter that Grandma wanted and for not visiting her. Certain that Grandma would turn her in and get her put back into the system, Liz does not approach her. Instead, she calls Lisa and learns that Jeanie is seriously ill and in the hospital. The two sisters agree to meet there. Afterward, Carlos and Sam cheer Liz up, but shortly after their joy is destroyed when Liz and Sam discover that Carlos is using coke. At the end of this chapter, Jeanie dies.
Chapter 9 Summary
Chapter Nine is unlike the other chapters in Breaking Night in that it is epistolary—that is, told in the form of a letter. In this case, it’s a letter from Liz to Jeanie, after Jeanie’s death. The letter reminds Jeanie who Carlos is and that he went to Jeanie’s funeral. Liz had been upset about the misprint on the box her mother was buried in—it had her first name spelled “Gene”—so Carlos used a black marker to fix the name and add an inscription.
Peter could not attend the funeral because he was caught trying to ride the train without a ticket, and Sam didn’t go because she couldn’t handle being at a funeral. After the funeral, Liz and Lisa go to eat with Liz’s friends and all of them miss their parents.
Liz also writes about how people marvel at the beauty of a pearl, but that pearls are a result of pain on the part of the oyster—that they’re made from unwanted bodies within the oyster itself.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Liz is homeless in this section of the memoir, but she hasn’t hit rock bottom yet because she and Sam still rely on Carlos to look after them and to pay for them to stay in the motel, where they can have a bed to sleep on and a roof over their heads. Because of his ability to meet their basic needs, Liz and Sam overlook many of Carlos’s shortcomings, including his bossy behavior, his frightening and growing propensity for violent reactions, and his drug use.
When Jeanie dies, Carlos is there for Liz, just like he had promised he would be. For this reason, she decides to stay with him even though a part of her knows what living with a coke addict entails. She’s worried about his behavior for his own wellbeing as well as Sam’s and her own, but she feels like Carlos is the only reason they survive, and that without him they wouldn’t be able to make it on the streets.
The symbolism of the oyster and the pearl in Liz’s letter to her mother in Chapter Nine is poignant. The pearl represents the result of all of Jeanie’s pain—the HIV virus, drugs, and alcohol that were all foreign and hazardous bodies in her mother’s system. The beauty is the love that she and her mother shared, but Liz also has to acknowledge the pain that accompanies that pearl. Liz feels a lot of guilt for how her mother’s funeral goes and for the fact that their family was torn apart while Jeanie was still alive.
Even though her mother was not always able to operate in a capacity to help her navigate life, Liz felt that her mother always cared for her. She knows her father cares about her, but feels betrayed by him since learning about Meredith and Walter, and because he didn’t tell her that he’d left their old apartment until well after he began living at the shelter. Lisa is angry with Liz for leaving while their mother was ill, so, with Jeanie’s death, Liz truly feels that she has no one in her family that she can turn to. Even though she may have been close to wanting to leave Carlos, she now feels she can’t because she believes she needs his support.
Unlock all 30 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: