Book 21: Orange Is the New Black

Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison

Piper Kerman

I'd like to think that I would have been drawn to this book even if I had never seen (and enjoyed!) the eponymous Netflix show, but with the new season still a few months away I was spurred to get my fix from the book that started it all. Experiencing Piper Kerman's story backwards, in a sense, was a bit disorienting, as many of the characters from the show are modeled after (or share names with) Kerman's fellow prisoners, but without overlapping directly. The storylines merge, diverge, and weave through one another in different ways, and I often found myself unable to reconcile the characters in my head (from the adaptation) with those on the page. This is, of course, my fault rather than Kerman's, and I've tried to keep that in mind while reading and thinking about the book. Television or no, however, Orange Is the New Black is undoubtedly an important work, for many of the same reasons that make it inherently problematic.

For all of her bad decisions, Piper Kerman is an awful lot like me: white, well-educated, and with all of the attendant benefits that come from being brought up in an economically stable middle-class household. It is, I suspect, for this reason that she wrote the book and has subsequently garnered so much attention for doing so: in Orange Is the New Black, Kerman brings the world of the very not-white, very uneducated, and very not-monied imprisoned population into the consciousness of those who are much more like her. It is a relief that Kerman only occasionally lapses into feeling sorry for herself and that, when she does, she is often quick to check herself and reexamine the relevant instincts. This privilege, alternately acknowledged and implicit, forms an undercurrent throughout the whole book, occasionally lending itself to thoughtful meditations on the meanings and effects of imprisonment as practiced in the modern United States and, more broadly, the catastrophic effects of the War on Drugs. These passages, however, often feel abbreviated and are, more often than not, indicative of the book's general tendency toward episodic anarchy. One gets the feeling that there is much more to be said, and much more meaning to be wrangled from Kerman's experiences, if only she would dig a bit deeper into the uncomfortable truths where she only scratches the surface.

The anecdotes and thinkpiece segments do, in some sense, form a coherent whole; the narrative flows smoothly from Kerman's infraction to her incarceration and, ultimately, her release. It can, however, be a bit difficult to remember who is who and to keep a grasp on the passage of time, even with the benefit of the visuals provided by an acquaintance with the Netflix series (and sometimes, perhaps, in spite of them). The prose is relatively straightforward and entirely adequate to the task, but, as I noted above, some of the incidents and observations pop up out of nowhere. Chapters that revolve around a particular theme will suddenly switch gears for a page or two, only to devolve back into the original train of thought, and the ending is far too abrupt to offer any reasonable sense of closure. Sure, Kerman stops at an appropriate point in the story, but surely she could have offered some meaningful, summarizing reflections on her time of prison to offer a sense of closure. Then again, perhaps this isn't authorial or editorial clumsiness; perhaps the reader's disorientation is meant to echo Kerman's, as she suddenly finds herself confronted with a freedom that she can't quite comprehend after more than a year of incarceration.

Nonetheless, the book's ending undermines some of the meditative goodwill Kerman strives to build while musing on everything from the difficulties and heartbreak of trying to reconcile imprisonment with motherhood to the simple joy that comes from finding community in even the most adverse circumstances. Kerman delivers a warts-and-all vision of the prison experience, but it is notable how much time she spends examining the types of community and solidarity that develop between women who are behind bars. Most importantly, she offers a humanizing portrait of those who, as she notes time and again, we are brutally inclined to cast off as the detritus of society, whose humanity we rob by labeling them insufficient and casting them away from view, with no resources to sustain them or (perish the thought) allow them to successfully reenter (or, in many cases, first become a part of) law-abiding society. Though Kerman's experience necessarily originates from a very particular point of view, it is this through this lens that she makes the prison experience understandable to those who are, in most ways (save, one hopes, for the drug money laundering bit) much like her. Orange Is the New Black is an enlightening, though necessarily flawed, exposé of the United States prison system, an overburdened, underfunded, and woefully inadequate revolving door for those whom society lets down time and again; if it takes a middle-class white woman to get us to pay attention, well, at least now we're listening.

Grade: A-