LC Meridian

Issue date: 12/3/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: macfound.org Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

The award-winning author Adrian Nicole LeBlanc visited Lehman on November 8 to give a reading and discuss the writing of her bestselling book, "Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx."

"Random Family" follows an extended Puerto Rican family that originally lived in the South Bronx and moved all over the Bronx and upstate.

"I followed them for almost 12 years, many different people at different times and it sort off chronicles primarily the lives of two of the young women I met, Jessica and her sister in law Coco and then their children as their children get older," said LeBlanc.

Coco and Jessica endure betrayal, homelessness and throughout it all, the treacherous damage of poverty.

"To know Coco or Jessica is to know so many other girls who are victims of their circumstances," said Vicki Johnson, 19, a freshman.

"The project originally began as a book about a young heroin dealer named Boy George," LeBlanc explained. "My journalism career started covering crime and he was one of the people I sort off met in my trials in the late '80s."

At 23, Boy George was arrested after having amassed millions of dollars. Jessica was one of his main girlfriends.

"Jessica would go and visit him in prison and I started hanging out with her and her family and became more interested in her life and what she was going through than I did in his," said LeBlanc.

The book starts with George and Jessica as teenagers, and follows them and Coco, who is in love with Jessica's brother Cesar, into adulthood.

After reading passages from the book and discussing its background, LeBlanc invited questions from the students.

"The original story, which was about Boy George, was an assignment for Rolling Stone Magazine," said LeBlanc. "They ended up not publishing the article because I could not get George to speak freely about his drug business."

LeBlanc told the audience that she and Boy George had made a deal: "If he was acquitted at trial, I was not to use the information he gave me and if he was convicted I had to wait until his appeal was denied," said LeBlanc. "If I did he would kill me, so it was a deal that I was not going to mess around with. He killed I think 7 people you know, so he wasn't kidding."

The audience included students from Walton High School in the Bronx and Independent High School in Manhattan. The event attracted over 175 students, faculty and members of the community.

"This was the biggest audience we have had," said Professor Fendelman, who runs the City and Humanities Program that hosts the series.

"For a moment I thought she was telling my story," said Melissa Diaz, 16, from Walton High School.

"I could not put the book down… Her words just ring so true to those who have struggled with being homeless and living in the projects," said Jennifer Reyes, 23, a resident of Bedford Park. "I read in Lehman's website that she was coming to Lehman and I wanted to meet her."

LeBlanc said the idea for the book came from "a clip in Newsday which was announcing the trial of Boy George." "Random Family" has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Margolis Award (given to a promising new journalist whose work reflects concern for social issues) and the International Lettre Award (given to reporters who "set out for unfamiliar territories as eyewitnesses to history and detectives of the unknown").

"She did not try to be all gangsters… I liked how she stayed true to herself," said Chris Simpkins, 22, a sophomore.

"I would go visit George and sometimes I would be able to smuggle in paper and often I wasn't…Luckily, in many visiting rooms they had an area for children. They usually had paper and crayons," said LeBlanc. She would pretend to be coloring and instead took notes and often would write key words or phrases to remind her of events.

As a journalist, LeBlanc is attracted to how regular people are living their lives. "I think there are really rich stories everywhere and you just have to tease them out," she said.

When asked by a member of the audience if she wrote the book on a deadline, she responded, "I had all the time in the world, I did not have a real contract and I was not doing this for money… I was just really curious." LeBlanc went through five editors and two publishers.

It was not until LeBlanc met Coco that she found her focus. "I realized I was writing about a girl's experience in poverty and about her love for Cesar, who was incarcerated, and how this impacted her and her family and just a love story."

LeBlanc, who grew up in Leominster, Massachusetts, attended Smith College, Oxford and Yale. After earning her Master's degree in Modern Literature at Oxford, she worked as an editor for Seventeen Magazine. She has written for the New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times, Village Voice and other publications. She has also received many awards, including a Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe, a MacDowell Colony Residency, and a Soros Media Fellowship.

She is now working on a nonfiction book about stand-up comedy. "I've been reporting on stand-up comedians for the last five years," said LeBlanc. "At first I was shocked by their jokes, their language and their relationships… But now I go to comedy clubs and nothing they say shocks me."

LeBlanc said that along with its literary success, "Random Family's" gift to her has been the continuity of the relationships she made writing it.

"I'm very close to Coco's family. I talked to her the other day and talk to the kids every day… I see Cesar, who is still incarcerated, once every six weeks if I can," said LeBlanc. "With Jessica I'm not in close touch, but I sort of know what's going on in her life." She is no longer in contact with Boy George.

"When the book came out and the people in the book read it," said LeBlanc, "I was scared of what their reactions would be. Coco's sister-in-law said to me, 'Adrian, you are always talking about these people that are going to learn about this and come to understand. I don't give a shit about those people. I just like that I can read a book about a girl like me,' I never thought of it like that. That really made me happy."

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