Orange Is the New Black by Piper Kerman
I had no idea it was a book before it was a hit show until I came across it on my library app. Since I can't handle how raw the show is, I was delighted to discover I could instead read Piper's story about her time in prison, and get it straight from the source.
Piper Kerman came from a high-achieving WASP family on the East Coast. She went to a liberal arts college for women, and dabbled in loving the ladies. Upon graduation, she was bored and lost, and found herself taking up with her exotic and adventurous neighbor, Nora. That took her on a wild ride of international drug trading and money laundering, where the reader is left wondering what the hell she's doing because nothing can explain away how clearly batshit crazy it is. There's no way to hide that she's out of her mind and going to get in serious trouble, no matter how many times she says she wasn't really clear on what was going on and this is the very type of thing lost college grads can find themselves falling into.
She ended up serving fifteen months in prison ten months after she walked away from it all. When the Feds finally come calling, she's a high-achieving WASP like her family would expect, and she's also on the straight and narrow, in a committed relationship with a nice man named Larry.
Piper wasn't the typical prisoner and got plenty of second looks from both prisoners and prison staff. Not only did she look different, but her friends and family loaded her up with books that were falling out of her cell locker. The thing that bothered me was she seemed to identify with it. She really believed she wasn't like the others. I wanted to scream.
Then something shifted in her. Deep into her sentence, she really opened up and she got it. Her transformation was beautiful to read, and her work for female prisoners' rights these days deserves a standing ovation.
Fun fact: Martha Stewart was sentenced while Piper was in prison and she was supposed to go to Piper's prison, Danbury, but at the last minute was sent somewhere else.
General consensus: An interesting but also educational read about the US prison system.
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