New York City, 1979. Joanna is seven years old when she is sent into the streets to deliver cocaine. By day, she is left alone in a locked apartment in Jackson Heights. By night, she lies awake wondering whether she will survive until morning. After years of instability, fear, and abandonment, Joanna is placed in foster care. But the safety she has been promised remains painfully out of reach. Instead, she finds herself navigating a system that, in ways she never imagined, begins to mirror the very harm she was supposed to escape.

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In Running Into the Night, Marina Aris delivers an unflinching and deeply personal account of a childhood shaped by neglect, violence, and loss. With searing honesty, she confronts not only what happened to her, but the wounds that followed her into adulthood and the difficult journey of understanding what it truly means to survive. Raw, intimate, and unforgettable, Running Into the Night is more than a story of survival. It is a story of reckoning, resilience, and the courage to confront the past rather than remain defined by it. For readers of powerful memoirs about overcoming childhood trauma and reclaiming one's life, this is the unforgettable story of a girl forced to grow up too soon and the woman she ultimately became.