We’d walked to the restaurant, and she literally did cause a stir on the street. I’d never been that close to the power of beauty. She was changing the environment around her. Young women elicit such responses, and despite all the obvious complications, not many manage their sexual power when they are so young, and fewer still seem to enjoy it. Following Jessica out of the prison as we made our way to Little Italy was a little like being behind Moses as he parted the Red Sea.
None of this is why I opened the book with Jessica hitting the street. I had tried all sorts of openings. They lacked this immediacy. I rewrote the opening of the book at least forty-five times. It felt as if sixty per cent to seventy-five per cent of the time writing the book went to those first twenty-five pages. The relationships were so complex, and, depending on how old Jessica was, a certain number of facts had to be explained. Some of those terms weren’t easy to state without lengthy explanation. How to get the reader up to speed for the story? Finally, my editor and I decided to simply dive in from the place of understanding where I’d landed after ten years and hope the reader would be engaged enough by Jessica’s extraordinary charisma that they’d want to catch up to whatever initially might confuse them.
* * *
What was it like for your subjects to welcome you into their lives? And what was it like for you to live in their world and then return to your life at the end of the day?
“Welcoming” invokes more conventional, scheduled-event reporting, and it is hard to relate that word to my experience with “Random Family.” There’s also the issue of house pride implied by the question, and while I’m sure some of the people in the book may have felt conscious of me early on in light of that concern, it was never one of my particular issues. I was familiar with the type of spaces I was in, because of my childhood and other reporting I’d done—and I was very comfortable in most of them.
These visits were experiences in the context of long relationships—hundreds of hours spent together. The primary subjects are people I came to know well, along with many members of their families. I spent open-ended time with certain people over many years, and I was included unquestioningly in many things. I worried more about their generosity toward me—giving me the empty bed when people were sleeping on the floor; a plate of food when there was a limited amount—but I quickly lost those privileges, which was a relief. I do recall being concerned about people becoming so used to me that they would not feel comfortable asking me to leave. So much discussion about reporting revolves around getting or keeping access: I think some attention would be well-placed on the implications of having it—i.e., it’s hard for people who know you and care about you to ask you to step out of the room. Because I was around so much, and often treated familially, people didn’t remember to worry about my presence as a reporter. I would remind them, but I, too, was invested in the familiarity. I suppose, too, it felt less like work over time—it was my life.
There were days when I forgot that I was reporting (always a sure sign of good work!), and I remember one specifically: Coco had gone to the E.R. with her brother, and one of the children asked me for paper from my notebook. I was the go-to source for paper and pens, and the children liked to draw. Only when she asked me for my reporter’s pad did I realize that I’d become so consumed by the day—overwhelmed by it—that I’d forgotten to take out my notebook. The scary night in question in this passage was terrifying for all of us. Both Coco and I were glad for one another’s presence. We love each other. I think—and this is true for many single parents with small children—that it’s always helpful to have another adult around. Danger was always mitigated by companionship.
