The book Random Family is out in paperback and I bought it yesterday as an early Done With The Semester gift to myself (talk about a rationalization).

The book itself has a site (linked above) with this great passage from the first chapter:

Jessica lived on Tremont Avenue, on one of the poorer blocks in a very poor section of the Bronx. She dressed even to go to the store. Chance was opportunity in the ghetto and you had to be prepared for anything. Her appearance on the streets in her neighborhood usually caused a stir. A sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl with bright hazel eyes, a generous mouth, and a voluptuous shape, she radiated intimacy wherever she went. You could be talking to her in the bustle of Tremont and feel as though lovers' confidences were being exchanged beneath a tent of sheets. Guys in cars offered rides. Women pursed their lips, grown men got stupid, boys made promises they could not keep.

The book is fantastic, the author spent ten years hanging out in this neighborhood, doing the reporting. Slightly disturbing to me that Jessica's mother is a grandmother at age 34. Which makes sense...if I had a kid at 17 and THAT kid had a kid at 17, there you go.

Of course that would require me to, you know, do it with a woman as I understand that has something to do with the way babies are made.