Recently Released  |   Bookshelf  |  Library Pick  |   Book Club   |  Message Board  | Book Chat |  Books Home

NYC Book Club Conversation With Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

On April 30, Gotham Gazette held a NYC Book Club online chat with Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx.


Gotham Gazette:
How did you first meet Coco, Jessica and the other people you feature in Random Family?

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc:
Jessica through Boy George, And Coco through Jessica. Coco introduced me to many family and friends. I met Boy George in the courtroom at his trial.

GG:
When did you realize that the story of Random Family was a story you wanted to tell?

AL:
Immediately. I was completely absorbed.

GG:
For the online visitors who may not have completed your book, can you tell them what Random Family is about?

AL:
It's about many issues--urban poverty, prisons, racism--but I think of it as two love stories, and the lives of two girls coming of age, and their families.

GG:
In your author’s note, you say that you were present for much of what is described in Random Family. What was it like being a part of these women’s lives for the ten years you spent researching the book, staying with them, going on prison visits?

AL:
It was an exciting, challenging, and often baffling experience for me. What I love about reporting is the deep immersion into worlds that challenge my thinking--that assure me of my ignorance, and require me to think and feel specifically. I should add that it was also very saddening.

GG:
What moments were the most difficult, could you describe one or two of them for us?

AL:
Many moments were difficult. One example might be the day I accompanied Coco to collect her children from Ramapo Camp. Their experience was in some ways, I think, threatening to her, despite her profound hope and love for them. But it was hard to watch the children's excitement collapse in their sensitivity to her struggle with being on the sidelines of their experience.

GG:
Did you want to step in at times, and help out or give advice?

AL:
Rarely. It became clear immediately that I was the one who needed teaching and guidance on the world I was entering. One sure thing about poverty is people who are surviving it have tried just about everything to make their lives better, and that they are great improvisers and smarter than I ever could be. To give advice assumes you know something someone else doesn't. It wasn't the case. I was learning from them. And they were extraordinary teachers.

GG:
What were some of the most important things you learned?

AL:
I think they are lessons that will continue for the rest of my life. But some of what I know I learned now include the stamina poverty requires, and that damaging circumstances do damage. I learned also that conversations that reduce economic injustice to personal choice issues are not only distracting from the real work that needs to be done, but unjust themselves.

GG:
What do you mean by "personal choice issues"?

AL:
Much of the public conversation reduces structural issues--transportation problems, health impairment, day care issues--to judgments such as "lack of motivation" or "lack of will."

GG:
You said that you weren't tempted to give advice, but were you tempted to help out financially?

AL:
I didn't have much money myself. But money is a great distraction in source connections, and quality journalists don't get into it.

GG:
Did they ever ask you to help out?

AL:
Extremely rarely. A few times, strangers did, but not the principals.

GG:
You must have gotten to know South Bronx very well during the time you were reporting. How has it changed, or stayed the same since you first started working on Random Family?

AL:
I only got to know a few neighborhoods somewhat well. There seem to be many changes, though.

GG:
What are some of the most striking?

AL:
The decline of the outdoor drug market. There has also been a fair amount of building--single family homes, for example. Although nowhere near the demand.

Melissa McNamara:
Hi Ms. LeBlanc...I'm wondering what the reaction has been from the girls' families to the book's publication. And, did you know from the start that your reporting would turn into a book?

AL:
I didn't know that it would turn into a book initially. Overall, the response has been positive.

GG:
Can you tell us what any of the main protagonists said? Coco, for example?

AL:
She was somewhat relieved that some of her experience --her early years--would be available to her children from an outside source, because some of it was so painful to her.

GG:
Did Cesar read the book? What did he think?

AL:
Yes. He read it in one long day and night. He was glad to learn about his daughters' lives in the free world, because he has been in prison. He also told me that he learned about his family through my perspective on some of what had happened to him. We continue to have long debates and discussions about the issues raised in the book both personally and professionally.

GG:
Your book shows how many obstacles there are for poor people– You write, "When you were poor, you had to have luck and do nearly everything absolutely right. In a life as vulnerable to outside forces as Coco’s and her two little girls’, the consequences of even the most mundane act of kindness could be severe. The $10 loan to a neighbor might mean no bus fare, which might mean a missed appointment, which might lead to a two-week loss of WIC." – yet you don’t make any policy recommendations, or analysis in Random Family. Why did you decide to leave this out?

AL:
I feel that the things we need to do are so obvious. Youth programs, quality day care, transportation subsidies, safe housing--all of these things work and we know it. It's not rocket science. What I think is missing from the conversation--if there is still one nationally--is the assumption of the deep and complex humanity of poor people. And I'm a story teller. Not a policy analyst.

GG:
How did the Rockefeller drug laws affect the subjects of Random Family?

AL:
Interestingly, in retrospect, I think this is a book that documents the early impact of those laws. The only reason the young people were employed in the trade was because young people dodged the laws, at first, and older drug dealers responded by hiring underage kids. The damage is extensive, and both obvious and subtle. I guess my answer would be, trainwrecked so many lives.

GG:
Can you give us some examples of how this happened to people in your book?

AL:
It's intricate. But one way in might be the way that drug selling traversed their day-to-day lives in ways that created assumptions about the future. So, for example, some young men worked as dealers to help get drugs to their moms, so their moms wouldn't publicly humiliate themselves by trying to get drugs in other ways. It's a bleak, boring, deadly business. Richard Price captures it perfectly in Clockers and some of his other books.

GG:
Are there other books out there that you would recommend - in terms of policy analysis, as well?

AL:
Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here. Jonathan Kozol. Robert Cole's work, especially Children of Crisis. Susan Sheehan. William Finnegan's Cold New World. There are so many. Cristina Rathbone.

GG:
In Random Family, you write that Coco’s case worker at the Thorpe House wanted to tell her "Get away from your family." Family, for Coco, also means her extended "random family," Cesar’s mother and his sister Jessica, and her children. Do you agree with the caseworker, or admire Coco for always giving so much of the little she had?

AL:
I understand both, and the conflict seems irresolvable. It bumps into the perversion of poverty--to have to choose between saving oneself and loving one's family. What an impossible choice!

GG:
In her New York Times review of your book, Margaret Talbot wrote, "In truth, you wouldn't want every book about poverty to be like LeBlanc's. As good as it is at foiling simple-minded or overly optimistic social reform schemes, there's a kind of Dreiserian fatalism about it. Its very dedication to portraying the multiplicity of hurdles, the bewildering entanglement of personal failure and structural inequality that marks lives like Coco's, allows a kind of exhaustion to creep in, not so much in the reader as in the would-be policy maker." Do you think that people who read Random Family might be too overwhelmed by all of the problems to try to change things?

AL:
It's hard to empathize with the sentiment that less information--because it's painful--is better. If Coco and her children are LIVING this, I think the least we can do is read about it. To educate ourselves.

GG:
What do you think we should do with that education?

AL:
Become active about a world we all share.

GG:
Are you optimistic that things can change?

AL:
Absolutely. We have the knowledge. What we lack is political will.

Paul:
Do you believe the situation described in Random Family has gotten better or worse since you began the book? To what extent has welfare reform policy helped or hurt that situation?

AL:
Mainly worse. Welfare reform has helped some of the moms-- by expanding the boundaries of their experiences in some ways-- but a terrific burden of parenting responsibilities have fallen on the children. Because of low minimum wage work that requires parents to work long, long hours. And because there are no youth programs and decent day care to supplement the absence of parents for those hours.

Paul:
Can you elaborate? I thought the statistics for teenage pregancy and welfare dependency improved over the course of the 1990's.

AL:
They have. But I am responding to the impact of the policies on those young people who are still part of an intergenerational cycle.

GG:
Is the situation of poverty and poor families in New York City very different from other cities?

AL:
I can't answer that very intelligently. Even within NYC, this is one area. I'm sure the broader struggle is the same.

GG:
After witnessing Coco’s struggles with bureaucracy, what do you think about state and city social services programs? What should be changed?

AL:
They need better staff training, and much more staff support. These are hard, high burn-out jobs, often staffed by folks barely out of poverty themselves. But one thing needed desperately is a coordination of services. Much like what we're seeing in cancer treatment-- breast cancer centers, for example, where all kinds of specialists team up for patient care. Same model would be useful in social services. Right now, agencies tend to respond to specific needs, largely on an emergency basis. And these are chronic, long-term needs.

GG:
Why is that? Is it that the funding is not there?

AL:
What funding? The budget cuts have been profound.

GG:
Which budget cuts in particular do you find pernicious?

AL:
What ones aren't? ALL afterschool programming? Counselors? Alternative schools are closing down. No substantive help for kids at risk, yet funding for criminal justice remains firm. It's short-sighted, and profoundly punitive. To not have money for a youth job program, yet to spend $30,000 on kids in junveile hall.

GG:
The Bloomberg administration says they have a $3.8 billion gap not of their own making. What can they do instead?

AL:
I don't know what they can do instead, but I know if public eduation continues to be marginalized, we are deciding much more than budget cuts.

Paul:
Could I interject a question about the process of writing Random Family? Approximately how much of your time was physically spent with the characters over the decade of the story? Were there comparable non-fiction books that influenced you (I'm thinking of Alex Kotlowitz's book about a family in the Cabrini project, for example).

AL:
Alex Kotlowitz remains a great inspiration to me. The balance between reporting and writing varied enormously. Sometimes I had weeks for the field work, while at other times I had to report elsewhere to make a living as a journalist. The writing tended to happen in spurts. But the real writing of the final version that went into several revisions, I think happened in an intense period of writing that took about a total of 18 months.

GG:
What has happened in the lives of the characters of Random Family after the point where your book leaves off?

AL:
Folks are working. Cesar and Boy George remain incarcerated.

GG:
Will the book have any impact on their lives?

AL:
I hope so. I know that just knowing them has changed and enlivened mine.

This website is brought to you by Citizens Union Foundation. It was made possible by a grant from the Charles Revson Foundation, and receives support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Times Foundation, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, the Altman Foundation, and viewers like you. Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution.