7.4 /10 1 Votes
Language English ISBN 978-0-812-98618-1 Genre Memoir Country United States of America | 3.7/5 Goodreads Pages 327 Originally published 6 April 2010 Page count 327 Publisher Spiegel & Grau | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Memoirs Eat - Pray - Love, The Glass Castle, North of Ithaka: A Journey, Abominable Firebug, Fat Girl: A True Story | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison (titled Orange Is the New Black: My Time in a Women's Prison in some editions) is a 2010 memoir by Piper Kerman, which tells the story of her money laundering and drug trafficking conviction and subsequent year spent in a federal women's prison.
Contents
The book became the basis of the Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black.
Early involvement
The memoir details the events which occur as a result of Piper Kerman's involvement with Nora Jansen, a former friend, lover and drug smuggler. In 1993, shortly after her graduation from Smith College, Kerman agreed to accompany Jansen on several trips to Asia and Europe, going as far as carrying a suitcase of laundered money across the Atlantic Ocean before returning to San Francisco to "piece her life back together". In May 1998, Kerman was visited by two Customs agents, and six years later she was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison. After serving time in three different facilities (FPC Danbury, FTC Oklahoma City, and MCC Chicago), Kerman was released in March 2005.
Reception
Sasha Abramsky of the Columbia Journalism Review stated that the book "documents the author’s attempts to preserve her individuality in the face of a gray, impersonal bureaucracy—one based around prisoner counts, strip searches, rules governing the minutiae of life, and continual reminders that prisoners, by definition, have no power, no real autonomy." Abramsky wrote that the book is mostly "a journey of self-discovery, describing how one can find one’s true strengths during moments of adversity" and that it "is more similar to South African anti-apartheid activist Albie Sachs's Jail Diary than it is to, say, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s denunciatory communiqués from Pennsylvania’s death row."
In her review for Slate, Jessica Grose argued that the book is not an examination of women within prison but rather a member of the middle-class-transgression genre, in which women from higher level social classes go into situations which are considered degrading. She said that the book should have included Kerman's insight into her own behavior and "A bit of this moral ambiguity would have helped Kerman's memoir a whole lot." June Thomas, also from Slate, cited Grose's review and stated that, "Ultimately, though, the book feels like a well-written, readable stage in Kerman’s rehabilitation." Thomas stated that the television show had improved on the book by expanding on Kerman's descriptions of real people and turning them into compelling fictional characters.
The book was selected by the UC Santa Barbara Library as its 2015 book for the university-wide reading program "UCSB Reads".