Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx is a 2003 narrative non-fiction study of urban life by American writer Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.
The book, LeBlanc's first, took more than 10 years to research and write. Random Family is a nonfiction account of the struggles of two women and their family as they deal with love, drug dealers, babies and prison time in the Bronx. LeBlanc began the long period of research after reporting on a piece in Newsday about the trial of "a hugely successful heroin dealer" named George 'Boy George' Rivera.[1] [2]
Random Family was enthusiastically received by critics. On Bookmarks Magazine May/June 2003 issue, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (4.0 out of 5) based on critic reviews with the critical summary stating, "Yet at its best, Random Family puts a human face on larger issues of public policy, revealing how, against all odds, love binds even the most random of families together."[3] [4] [5]
In The New York Times, critic Janet Maslin described LeBlanc's work as "a book that exerts the fascination of a classic, unflinching documentary."[6] Mark Kramer, director of the Nieman Foundation Program on Narrative Journalism at Harvard University, praised the book's "relentless neutrality."[7] In The New York Times Book Review, Margaret Talbot wrote, "The conventional compliment to pay a work of narrative nonfiction is to say that it's 'novelistic' or that it 'reads like fiction.' You could certainly say that of 'Random Family,' and yet there are tasks a writer like LeBlanc must accomplish that are different, and in some ways more difficult, than a novelist's. For one thing, she must remain cleareyed about people to whom she owes a tremendous debt of gratitude for admitting her into the intimacies of their lives. And for another, she must hew to a plotline that is often stuttering and circular and decidedly lacking in resolution. None of the people she writes about veer definitively toward a newer or better life — they tend toward the same tired grooves — yet she makes their stories riveting"; Talbot called LeBlanc's work, "An extraordinary book."[8] A review in the Boston Phoenix pointed out the colonialist, de-humanizing premise of a white woman making field notes a là Jane Goodall of a minority household for the consumption of a largely white and relatively affluent audience. In 2024, Random Family was ranked #25 of the best books of the 21st century by the New York Times.[9]
LeBlanc and Random Family garnered several awards and nominations. Her research methods earned her a spot among several other journalists and nonfiction writers in Robert Boynton's book, The New New Journalism.[10] In 2006, LeBlanc received a MacArthur Fellowship, more popularly known as a "Genius Grant".