Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

(33) This is a non-fiction account of an extended circle of friends and family growing up in the projects of the Bronx in the 90's. Their lives are riddled with drugs, teen pregnancy, prison, unstable housing, food insecurity. The author managed to embed and befriend several of the subjects. She then writes the book in such a way that she herself disappears - it reads like fiction from multiple POVs. At first, it is so hard to read as it is so sordid. The people in the novel are not portrayed as victims, nor blameless in their predicaments. Yet, you cannot help empathizing with what seems their inevitable fates. You can't make good decisions if you have never developed emotional regulation, basic critical thinking skills, nor even had show more role models that show you what safety, security, and sanity might look like.

One of the main people followed is Coco - a young Puerto Rican girl who becomes sexually active at 13 and pregnant shortly after that and drops out of school. The typical dynamic is for the young pregnant adolescent to then move in to the father of the baby's childhood bedroom with him while she has a "belly." He is usually involved in a life of crime in some way; typically drugs, and inevitably impregnates multiple other teenagers and ends up in jail. Eventually Coco moves back home for her mother (usually also with a drug problem and/or a string of abusive boyfriends) to raise the child. Coco herself is usually generous, loving, and decidedly NOT addicted. She tries really hard to be a good mother ... and tries to better their lives. And yet. She has no tools to do so. Pregnancy seems to be a status symbol in a world where there is very little currency - thus, access to birth control is not actually the barrier here.

This is a book that shows, and not tells. And leaves it at that. You draw your own conclusions. I remember reading Erskine Caldwell's 'Tobacco Road,' a fictional account of poor rural Southern sharecroppers lives. The people were so -- well, stupid, careless, pathetic and I remember thinking - "Why?" Why, indeed. I recently discovered this book on the New York Times 100 best books of the 21st century list. I can see why it made it. show less

This work of immersive journalism follows several Bronx Puerto Ricans and their circle of family and friends for over a decade. There is extensive poverty, drug dealing/use, teen pregnancy, incarcerations, and both child and spousal abuse. They also struggle to work with shelters, public housing authorities, social services, hospitals, and schools, most of which are not as supportive as they could be. This very long dense book is a gut-wrenching ride and will anger you. You will be mad at the repeated stupidity of the main characters as well as the socio-political-economic system that created and is continuing to govern their situations. The most devastating takeaway for me was the women and their attitudes towards men and their show more relationship to them. It is deeply ingrained patriarchy and misogyny at its absolute worst and I feel that it is the driving force that perpetuates most of their struggles. I highly recommend you pick up this book even if you only read half of it. It's long, but accessible and reads like an urban soap opera. show less

Random Family was written over 10 years by LeBlanc who immersed herself in the lives of an extended family of Puerto Ricans living in serious poverty in the Bronx. As a non-fiction book this is a little old now in relation to it's subject matter (written in 2003, chronicling from 1985 to 2000), but no matter - it's still incredibly powerful stuff.

As an immersive piece of fly-on-the-wall piece of journalism (LeBlanc was trusted and welcomed into the lives of those she chronicled), this book is so affecting because of the extended length of time the author spent with her subjects. We don't just read about the 'whats' in their lives - by really getting under the hood of their world we start to understand a little more about their 'whys' in show more terms of bad choices made.

At its heart this is a story about abject poverty in an area overrun by crime. Depressingly, although each generation wants better for their children than their own upbringing, the cycle gets endlessly repeated again and again. Young mothers (14, 15, 16) end up with large families from different fathers while they're still adolescents themselves. Families typically have no firm roofs over their heads, drifting between small, rundown apartments belonging to extended family members that often have multiple adults and children already living in them. Adults most usually are unemployed or ensconced in the drug trade. Addictions are the norm, child molestation is common but not dwelled on (there are so many adults on the scene figuring out the culprit is often near to impossible), and kids are generally neglected by their families and schools despite good intentions. Young girls typically end up bearing the brunt of the work in bringing up their younger siblings (before starting motherhood themselves), and young boys - lacking guidance from fathers who are usually not involved in their upbringing and typically in jail by their late teens or murdered - eventually get into trouble on the streets, with tough attitudes and uncontrolled anger leading quickly to involvement in gangs, drugs and serious crime.

LeBlanc started writing this novel after following the trial of notorious young drug kingpin Boy George, who, before being sent down for life, was living the high life with Bentleys, jewellery, furs and beautiful women. One of those girls was Jessica, a knockout girl from a poor slum in the Bronx, and it's starting with Jessica that LeBlanc weaves this true story. Within 15 years, Jessica will have gone from rags to riches to a 10 year prison sentence back to rags, becoming a mother of 5 and grandmother of 1 in that same period. We also follow the story of her brother Cesar and his inevitable spiral into crime, and that of Coco, mother to 2 of Cesar's children who extracts herself from the Bronx but ultimately can't escape the grinding poverty that keeps her stuck in the same cycle as previous generations.

As a white, privileged reader, many of the life choices made seem utterly crazy - more babies when they can't cope with the ones they already have, money windfalls (from robberies or insurance claims) frittered away within weeks. However, LeBlanc is pretty successful by the end of the book in helping us understand that when living in this level of extreme poverty, amid everyday violence and dysfunction, there are few support structures, few reliable people to guide or help, and few opportunities to do the right thing when the day-to-day grind is like quicksand.

This is not a book of hope and light at the end of the tunnel - it is a book of stark realism about those living in the poorest sectors of society.

Were it written today, I wonder would LeBlanc be accused of writing a story that is not hers to tell. I think in this case that would be an unfair argument. In researching Random Family she spent a significantly long time immersed in her characters' lives, and it's doubtful that any of her characters would ever have been in a situation privileged enough to have been able to write their story themselves.

5 stars - thoroughly engrossing, albeit incredibly tragic. show less

I thought maybe I was getting into a slightly more modern "A tree grows in Brooklyn" sort of story, but this is non-fiction, gritty, unvarnished living life in poverty and in spite of it. So many times throughout reading this book I'd think "why do they keep doing this? Why do they want to live at all if this is all they can find?" And the circumstances never get better, but they keep going and they keep bringing kids into this messy world, and they are never broken. It's truly amazing how kids, teenagers, can live entire lifetimes before some of us even get out of high school. This is very well done, and really brings empathy to circumstances many people abhor.

How do you approach reading a book that you expect to be really depressing? Let me give you an example: this book, Random Family, was pitched to me as a non-fiction tale following two women over the course of a generation, from when they're teenagers through when their kids are teenagers, living in the Bronx and then in upstate New York, in poverty, and shows their attempts and ultimate failures to break out of the situation they find themselves in.

I know, this sounds like the sort of book you want to just run out and read, right? And it really is. It's not that the description there is wrong. It's that it's too reductive. This book was engrossing, interesting, thought-provoking, and humanizing - even despite the overlay of desperation show more and depression that is certainly a part of it.

The story does indeed follow two women, Jessica and Coco, who live in the same neighborhood in the Bronx. The book starts out following Jessica more, and focuses more on Coco as she becomes interested in Jessica's brother, Cesar. Each of them is the product of a broken home, gets involved with criminals, has multiple kids by multiple parents, etc. That side of the story is pretty depressing, sure.

There's a lot of hope to the story, and a lot of attempt to struggle to improve, though. To make things happier for their kids, to provide a better life, to work some way out - these are the goals. Jessica and Coco, and really, everyone around them, make good choices some small amount of the time, and bad choices the rest of it, and unfortunately, it seems like you really need to make the right choice every time and have good luck to get out of the situation, and even if they know approaches - how to go homeless for a while to get better housing, how to move around to maximize your chances, etc. - the luck isn't perfect, and the ties to family are too strong to really escape.

There's a ton more to say about this book, all sorts of points to think from, about a kind of life that I've never had or probably never really could have imagined. LeBlanc's prose is clean and non-judgmental, and she had all the access she needed to tell the story properly. Not judging these people gives the book the impact it has; you can see their hopes and you can see their problems presented in an even-handed light. In the end, you feel worst for the kids, of which there are quite a lot, but then, at the outset of the story, Jessica, Coco, Jessica's brother and Coco's boyfriend Cesar, etc. were mostly kids, too.

Actually, in a sense, I feel worst for one of the secondary characters, Milagros, who was the best friend of Jessica's first baby's father. She decries relationships with men, doesn't want to have kids, and just wants to be independent, and because of the ties in the community she has, ends up with a life that she really couldn't have wanted, even if she makes a lot of the right choices for herself.

What it comes down to, then, is that this story speaks powerfully to the stickiness of poverty and its culture. There are no shortcuts out, and everything can drag you back in. The criminals have the flashy money and the easier life, it seems, but then they get sent to prison and are gone. Abuse is rampant, both physical and sexual, of children and adults, and then the victims have to live with that forever. The system set up to help them seems arbitrary, and has a hard time accommodating single mothers with multiple kids by different fathers, which almost all of these families are. Not having money means skimping on everything, but you need to look right to show poverty isn't grinding you down, so you buy the name brands and the pretty clothes and then flail for everything else. Whenever there is money, you have all sorts of ties to pay back to your family and friends - and there are all sorts of connections - and it seems gone within an instant.

This book really powerfully gets across to me the power of boredom, though. Good choices could be made more easily, but there's no access to a lot of the resources needed to fix that, and where there are, there's still awful, crushing boredom. So getting in fights is better than being bored, or hooking up with someone you shouldn't is better than just being bored, or getting high is better than just doing nothing. So many of the choices seem driven by just not having anything else apparent they can do, and that's what's ultimately the hardest to read.

So: yes, when you approach a book that seems this depressing, it can be hard, but something, there's a lot more there than the first description you hear. A lot more to make you think, and a lot more to life than just the hardships. These are real people, you can feel it, and there are real lessons to be learned. No wonder this got so many accolades. I very highly recommend this one. show less

Initially, I had difficulty getting into this book. The style, at the very beginning, was bare reportage. It felt like I was being hit with a barrage of names and events, with no analysis and narrative (as I would expect from this kind of non-fiction). But I was pulled into the lives of these people, and LeBlanc actually teases out the nuances of their lives more and more as the book progresses, and she lapses into greater poetry and analysis as the mounting experiences of the characters force an acknowledgement and investigation of the complexity of the social milieu in which they exist.

Although I was drawn into this world, I was also frustrated by it. Even knowing how to look at these lives from a sociological perspective, I wanted to show more do nothing more than grab each of the characters (I use this term meaning no disrespect to the real individuals, nor am I suggesting that they are caricatured) and tell them to use a condom, to go to school, to act in ways that would stop the vicious cycle in which they seemed trapped. My frustration was also directed at the bureaucratic and political system, which tries to help on the one hand but completely fails at it on the other. Ultimately, however, I did find there was some hope, even as my heart sank at the pronouncement of Serena's teen pregnancy. Or perhaps I need there to be hope. show less

i have some mixed feelings about this actually pretty amazing story and its host of people and information in its pages. i'm tempted to give it both more and fewer stars (more tempted to dock a half or whole star, though). this tells me that there are a lot of things to take from this book, and a lot of things i wish she'd done differently. but overall, this is an incredible display of reportage, a hugely important story that people of even remote privilege have no concept of, and a description of both hope and tragedy living together and battling to come out ahead.

the utter poverty and how people are forced to live is a world apart even from the people who are tasked to help the people chronicled in this book. (best example: an 11 year show more old is told by a social worker that she needs to help out her mom around the home, that she's old enough to do things like set the table for dinner. this kid's mom is about 26 and has never had a table to eat on in her life.) this book's greatest accomplishment, to me, is that it makes this life more relatable for those of us that (even reading this book) didn't really understand that all meals are taken on their laps. it makes the reader think that when these people have what we might consider chances (always living hand to mouth, on emergency food stamps, etc and suddenly coming into - through a court settlement - $17,000) and then they "waste" them (by spending all that money in only a couple of months, on a few material items that don't help them or improve their lives a bit) that they are living in a different world than the reader is. that they don't have bank accounts or credit cards, and that $17,000 is a good reason to get killed or robbed, so you might as well spend it on clubbing and cabbing while you can.

i feel like this is a really important book for all that it holds. i very very much wish it was written differently - that there was, if nothing else, an introduction in the book that lets the reader know that these are real people and their real experiences. that the author lived with them, or at least stayed with them, for over 10 years. that there isn't sugar coating or inferences, but that's why it sometimes reads a little choppily, or why we're sometimes missing a little information. but the information this book contains is truly astounding. the author had to live it with the people in the book. but for all that, and probably because of it, the people are so known without truly being known. the author cares about these people, especially (it seems from articles i've read) coco, but we actually aren't given a terribly sympathetic view of almost anyone in this book. we aren't made to root for them all that much, other than how you'd root for someone who is oppressed by the system in general. i'd like for this to have been a more personal writing - if the author didn't want to insert herself into the book itself, than an introduction which explained her award-worthy decade of immersion reporting and maybe a reason why it mattered to her, and a more personal writing of the few characters she documents. (this sounds weird because the details she writes are incredible, but i wanted more about the inner motivation, not just a reading of what happened without analysis.)

that is really my only complaint about this book; that and how long it takes to read it. but it's been on my mind a lot since opening to the first page and i suspect i'll be talking about it for a while. all good signs, so maybe it deserves more stars after all. show less