It’s not hard – but rather painful – to imagine that Precious’s story is directly based on true experiences.

And that’s just in the first ten minutes. Winner of the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize for drama at Sundance this year (along with a Special Jury Prize for Mo’nique’s performance as Precious’s downright horrifying mother), Precious tells the story of a morbidly obese teenager in the Bronx, illiterate, pregnant with her second child by her father and suffering daily physical and emotional abuse from her mother. My experience with the journalistic Random Family affected me when I saw Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire this week. Will the characters and their children ever break out of their toxic family patterns? We don’t know. This is not an inspirational tale of some inner-city kid being touched by a teacher and becoming inspire to enroll at Harvard Medical School and cure cancer. LeBlanc tells the story almost detachedly, never editorializing, never judging.

(And they were in no way alone in these behaviors – one look at the news reveals that human failings do not discriminate based on socioeconomic class lines.)Īnd yet, Random Family doesn’t pity its subjects. The way some of the men treated the women was abominable, the way some of the mothers raised their children was sometimes borderline (or not so borderline) negligent, and yet often they repeated the same destructive behavior from generation to generation. Their lives seem tragic to sheltered me, and yet, they weren’t much different from other people they knew. I used to pass them on the way from the parking lot to campus every day. I realized that I know these people, or people like them.

At one point, several of the characters move up the Hudson to the small city in which I went to college. The book grew progressively more heavy, and I grew progressively more depressed at the plight of these people, knowing that they are not only real, but they live in my city – and their experience is hardly an anomaly.

The first two pages introduce some of our main characters, their convoluted relationships, and drugs, and I figured that would be par for the course. At first, I was dubious – the story seemed overwrought for overwroughtness’s sake. In a graduate class called “Storied New York” last spring, one of our required texts was the book Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.

Precious sapphire book