“Random Family” is structured around the lives of two charismatic and troubled local matriarchs, Foxy and Lourdes, both grandmothers by the age of 35. There’s the love story of Foxy’s big-hearted, self-defeating daughter Coco and Lourdes’s petulant, hypermacho son Cesar, whose searing temper lands him in jail. Ten jails, actually. Another of Lourdes’s kids, Jessica, has a relationship with Boy George, who reads Yachting magazine and was clearing $100,000 a week in the heroin business by the time he was 21. It’s a keenly observed, pitch-perfect account of a world so grim that the line “Good news, Daddy’s in Rikers” makes perfect sense. Yet it’s also a world of great generosity, where people share everything from whatever’s in the refrigerator to a $70,000 personal-injury settlement.
It was Boy George who got LeBlanc started on her project when she wrote about him for Rolling Stone in 1989. When he introduced her to Jessica and Jessica introduced her to Coco, she knew she had a book, and that it had to be about the women. “I was struck by the fact that you could write about men and not write much about women,” she says, “but there was no way to write about women without having to write about men.”
To support herself, LeBlanc did magazine pieces and won grants and fellowships. But eventually the money ran out. “So in 1998,” she says, “I just decided to go into debt.” It paid off. What separates “Random Family” from other accounts of inner-city “pathology” is how vivid she makes her characters, in their faults as much as in their virtues. They can be infuriating–she’s pregnant again, they’re back together again, he quit school again. But they never blame anyone or anything–their parents, their environment, the dearth of opportunity to enter the American mainstream. Instead they hold themselves accountable and move on, or try to. It becomes a thick, dense, rich narrative: literary anthropology that reads like a novel.
On the crowded No. 2 train back to Manhattan, LeBlanc watches a man cleaning his fingernails with a box cutter. Fertile and complicated as this world is, isn’t she secretly relieved to be out of there? She shakes her head. “I feel like I could write this story for the rest of my life,” she says. “People say, ‘You must be so glad it’s over.’ I’m relieved, but secretly I’d love to write about it for another 10 years.”
