Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, a 2006 MacArthur Fellow, is the author of Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, which was chosen by more than twenty publications including the New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, People, and The Economist as one of the “Best Books of 2003.” Considered a contemporary classic of immersion journalism, Random Family has been described as a “nonfiction Middlemarch of the underclass” (The Los Angeles Times) and the “literary equivalent of a 100-mile dash” (The Washington Post). Her current project, Give It Up, concerns the lives of standup comedians and will be published by Random House. LeBlanc is a graduate of Oxford University and Yale Law School and is currently a visiting scholar at New York University’s School of Journalism. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker and Esquire.

You’ve written about adolescents living in poverty, drug dealers, prostitutes, prisoners—people on the margins of society. What draws you to write about these groups?

My father was a labor activist and my mom worked at a drug treatment center. There are a lot of social workers in my family and a lot of teachers. So I was raised to think you should make use of yourself, and whatever you do it should be useful. For me, something useful is to make things better. I definitely think journalism matters. Just look at Eric Schlosser and his book Fast Food Nation. It changed the way people eat.

I don’t know that I envisioned Random Family would change the way people think about poverty, but I definitely wrote it in hopes that it would make people more cautious about the big statements they tend to make about welfare and poverty.

You’ve said that your book Random Family was received in different ways depending on the audience. Can you explain?

When I went out and did readings, the middle class people in general received it as something that made them feel incredible empathy, pity, worry and consternation or lots of contempt and disgust and judgment. They had very strong reactions. Some people would come up to me and ask, ‘How could you not have done something to help the family?’ What I loved about that was that they were so affected by the story.  To me that says that they really connected with the characters.

In poorer communities I think they really felt as if someone had borne witness and attempted to explain the complexity of their existence. In fact, many of the people I met during these readings saw Coco [one of the book’s primary characters] as an incredibly strong person. They saw her life as something she had to survive not as something she had to be ashamed of.

The readings meant a lot to me because I really felt like people felt sincerely grateful for this story. A lot of people came up after the readings and said, ‘My son is locked up and I never know how to talk to people about it and you really explained how it feels.’ I was very affected by it.

You spent more than a decade working on Random Family. How did you sustain yourself mentally, emotionally and physically throughout this intensive project?

An editor once told me that Random Family was a young reporter’s book. It’s not the type of book you could write with kids at home. Well, there are some people who could manage it, but I needed to give myself 100 percent to it, and I did. As for how I sustained myself, I couldn’t have done it without my boyfriend. He was a spiritual center. He rooted for me every step of the way. He listened to me, and we laughed a lot.

Now when I work on a book, I have learned to pace myself better and to take care of myself as well. For example, I try really hard to stay healthy. Because I have late nights and I’m around places where there’s a lot of junk food, I try to bring fruit with me. I’ve learned that taking care of yourself is really important

Emotionally, it was self-perpetuating energy that sustained me. I get lethargic and depressed when I’m not connected to what I do, but as soon as I start to talk about it, I get excited about it again. So if I’m not writing about it or working on my notes, that’s when I get listless and depressed. The stakes rise the longer you're away from the work.

But even when I’m not working on the story, I’m always thinking about it. I don’t want to be away from it. If someone literally said, ‘You’ve got cancer Adrian and you’ve got six months to live. What are you going to do?’ I would tell them, ‘write as fast as I can,’ because it’s really what I like. I don’t find it fun, but it’s very meaningful to me. I would rather take a vacation when I’ve turned in a chapter,  and I’m so tired I can’t do anything but take a vacation.

So you never stop thinking about your work?

For me it’s rare that I am ever not thinking about it. So even if I'm out hiking, there's always a little voice in the back of my head mulling things over that are related to the work, or nudging me, "You need to get back and follow through that thought or finish that piece." But I've learned to trust the time it can take and also to allow for a fuller existence outside of the work, to not take the pressure I feel as seriously. It used to really freak me out, taking a vacation from my work. But now I feel like what’s another day going to do or another week. It’s probably a lot like if you’re a parent, and you go out to dinner with your partner, and you’re enjoying yourself but you’re aware that your baby is with a babysitter, and you want to make sure your cell phone is on. There are parents who can say I’m going out to dinner and turn the cell phone off, but that’s just not me.

When working on such involved projects, how much of your time is spent writing? How do you know when it’s time to write?

Some people can write as they go along, my editors suggest that I do this. But I just can’t. I want to know everything I have. I put on index cards -- the things that I know are scenes, but I don’t really want to write them until I reach that moment chronologically in the book. But if I’m going through my notebooks, and I’m super inspired, I might draft a scene.

I actually spend a lot of time and energy on not writing, and on all the anxiety that goes along with that. But once I start writing I always say to myself why didn’t I start sooner because the problems I face while writing are just so much more interesting than the anxiety of not writing. But it’s still such an issue for me to not write. I’m not a person who writes every day. Part of why I’m constantly telling students to keep writing is because it reminds me that it’s a better way to do it.

You’ve said that journalists need to “erode their judgment” while they are doing the reporting. Can you explain what you mean?

Well, I’m not really sure how useful judgment is in the fieldwork. It’s inherent in the writing because writing is about selecting and choosing the material you feel is most important. In essence you’re judging the material. But in the fieldwork you almost want to be as porous as humanly possible. And for many of us that’s a very unnerving experience. But judgment as a journalist blocks you from useful information. I miss a little bit of the character in my own jumping back. I think journalists struggle with this because in fact they are very opinionated people who have something to say. That is also why it is really important to have good editors. Good editors know you, and they know your blind spots. They know your strengths. They know your weaknesses. They know your obsessions. So when you write a piece and there is a problem, they can come to you and say ‘you never seem to ask about this, but it’s really important to the story.’ A good editor can compensate for your flaws.

You’ve said you felt very alone while working on your first book, Random Family. Now that you’re working on your second book, which happens to be about comedians, is the experience any different?

I definitely understand the process better, and when I feel down, I recognize it’s just part of that process. There are natural ups and downs. Now that I have support, I don’t let the problems become global. I don’t find myself asking questions like, ‘Why am I a writer?’ I just realize I’m having a bad day, and maybe I should go take a walk. The support definitely defuses the intensity of those hard moments.

I think it’s pretty lonely work being a journalist. As great as it is, you’re never really a part of what you’re reporting on. You’re always on the outside. That’s hard. It’s a weird need that journalists have to be around the action but not of it.

Generally I like not being on the inside of anything. I don’t want to say I’m a loner but I’m definitely quite comfortable in that position [as an outsider]. But with Random Family it was a constant conflict. My father used to always say ‘Are you a journalist or a social worker?’ because I found it incredibly traumatic to not be able to do something about the things I was watching and to not be able to help in the ways I thought I might be able to help, like making a phone call to help someone get an apartment.

I’m always interested in what writers read.  What are you reading these days?