Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
by Adrian Nicole LeBlancScribner, 416 pp., $25
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s look at the lives of one extended, patchwork family existing as part of the new urban poor in a notorious New York City ghetto is a portrait that lays bare the vicious cycle of the life of poverty: drugs, unwed teenage parents, violence, welfare, and jail. LeBlanc, formerly the Fiction editor at Seventeen magazine, spent 10 years living with the various characters. She has chosen telling details from a decade of life and imparted them with such honesty that their flaws are so much like our own that it becomes nearly impossible to pass judgment on them. LeBlanc starts by following the savagely sexy Jessica as she walks down the streets of her Bronx ghetto, gathering the stares of every man she passes. Her carefree generosity is infectious, but before the first chapter has ended, Jessica has already birthed three children out of wedlock, dropped out of the ninth grade, and taken up with an incredibly successful adolescent heroin dealer. The move is one that sets the stage for the rest of the book and the often-tragic choices found throughout — and the implications of those choices are not lost on any of the people whose lives LeBlanc chronicles. After Jessica’s life detours to a stint in the federal pen, LeBlanc seamlessly guides the narration along through Coco, the long-suffering girlfriend of Jessica’s younger brother Cesar. By Coco, LeBlanc is able to gauge the ups and downs of the ever-growing family of cousins, friends, neighbors, mothers, and past and current boyfriends. Ultimately, the journalist’s unsentimental look at life through her subjects’ eyes exposes the truth of what they are unable to change. “In the Bronx,” writes LeBlanc, “you always had to watch where you were going. The smallest moves in the wrong direction could have enormous consequences.”
This article appears in March 14 • 2003.