Her withdrawn, private attitude at Harvard has been mirrored in her relationship with the New York Times Scholarship Fund, with which Murray has not been in contact in recent months.

“We haven’t been in touch lately, but that’s because I haven’t been contacting them,” Murray says.

“They are very involved in the lives of their students. They want to help out,” she says. “But with all this answering to people about what I am trying to do with my life, it just becomes this external force. It clouds my perspective.”

Arthur Gelb, director of the program, says that Harvard returned her tuition last week and thus she is no longer part of the program.

Gelb says she has not answered his e-mails or letters.

“When Liz became when of our first scholars in the college scholarship program, she was a dedicated student. But she hasn’t been in touch with our program about why she is no longer at Harvard,” Gelb says. “All I can say is that she is a wonderful young woman, and we all wish her the greatest success in whatever she decides to do.”

Murray says she plans to get in touch with the program within the next few months.

Home at Last

Murray has returned to New York City now. She is independent, pays for her own apartment, takes care of her ailing father and spends time with her small group of friends—some of whom she has known since her days in public school.

She is happy, she says, and beginning to clear her head.

“There was too much noise in my head at the end of the day,” Murray says of her time at Harvard. “When I put my head down on my pillow, I want to hear my own voice. I just need to sit with myself and relax for a while.”

Of her plans to return to school, Murray says that other concerns have taken precedence.

“It’s hard to focus on academic things when your father is dying,” Murray says. “When people I love are in very much pain...well, they are the only support network I have, my family and friends. That is what I am focusing on now.”

She is also busy with the revisions of her book, due out in spring 2004, and the press generated by the Lifetime movie, which premiered on Monday and was the most-watched movie in Lifetime’s history.

She may have returned to the old Bronx neighborhood where she was raised, back to the city that she says she loves for its anonymity, but she has by no means retreated from the spotlight, at least not for now.