Her account is not all that remarkable to me--and likely was spiced up to give the story more appeal.
Many of us grew up hungry--even starving--lived through pure hell, and succeeded despite it. What we didn't have was a liberal newspaper trying to sell a feminist angle to sponsor us. In short, we survived, got through college and even further without any damn assistance at all.
And we are proudly conservative.
Alright, I can only really speak for myself. But I would match my experiences against hers without any hesitation. For the longest time I wouldn't even talk about it, because there's a sense of unworthiness and humiliation attached to those early experiences that's hard to describe. You just don't talk about it and you try not to think about it. When at long last you finally pull yourself out of a disaster of a childhood, you don't really want to spend any time dwelling on how truly bad it was. It was my wife who got me to thinking about it in terms of how remarkable (in her view) the transformation was. She could see it from her perspective; I refused to look at it from mine.
But, being male and white, I had no liberal organizations looking to make me into a pop star and no affirmative action quotas being tossed my direction. I went to state universities because they were all I could afford. That's alright. I'm very happy where and how I ended up. I don't think I would have enjoyed a liberal enclave like Harvard even if I had qualified and could afford to go to such a place.