When she returned to Harvard in January 2002, Murray was placed in a single in Currier and shared a bathroom with Bloomkatz.

“I liked Currier a lot,” Murray says, laughing. “Everybody cries about it, but I liked the separation. I liked leaving my classes behind, how it was a community. It looked kind of like an old age home or a hotel, but I liked it.”

Take Two

But it soon became apparent that the year away did nothing to simplify Murray’s life: technically still a freshman, Murray was struggling to finish her first-year courses, decide on a concentration, keep her apartment in New York and care for her father. And now she had a book deal, speaking engagements and a movie to think about.

Murray says that it was difficult keeping all these balls in the air.

“For my lecture circuit, I would leave school and come back the next day,” Murray says. “It was really a 24-hour thing, so it wasn’t like it was that much time, but it was hard to go away from campus for a day and be engrossed with something and then come back and have to pick up where you left off.”

Murray struggled to choose a concentration. She was leaning heavily towards Visual and Environmental Studies—she says that the professors were “totally cool,” and the small class setting appealed to her.

“Film was something I was always interested in, and it seemed like a small department,” says Murray, who tentatively plans to be a documentary filmmaker. “I was really in a developmental stage of what I wanted to do. I wanted to explore, but I knew I needed to be more concentrated.”

And on the social front Murray was still having trouble making real connections with her fellow students.

Murray says that her friends from home came to visit her often, and her neighbors in Currier say that they had little contact with her.

“She was either here with a friend or not here,” says Breanne Cooley ’04, one of Murray’s neighbors in Currier. “She would disappear for a couple of days at a time. She kind of kept to herself.”

Cooley says that she found Murray to be friendly when they did speak, and did not know that she had been homeless until word of the Lifetime movie came out.

“She seemed like the average college student.”

The Final Departure

In the autumn of 2002, filming of Murray’s movie began in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Shortly thereafter she left school for good.