Orange Is The New Black: My Year In A Women's Prison

[verymuchmeg]

*A review of the book by Piper Kerman, upon which the Netflix original TV show of the same title is based.

First of all, I'd like to recognize the fact that I am one of the many poseurs who never would've known about this book had it not been for the super addictive TV show on Netflix based upon it bearing the same name. Yup, that's me. Also, I'd like to admit that while I read the memoir, I did find myself frequently comparing it to the show: what's the same, what's different, and are the changes they made when adapting the book into the show good ones? I'm not proud of it, but I do think it's only natural if you have consumed media in one form to compare it to the other one in which you are currently experiencing it.

I liked the show, I found out it was based upon this memoir, and then I read the book. ...and I was SO not disappointed. First of all, I do enjoy the show, but my main problem is that I find the protagonist, Piper, completely unlikable onscreen. She is whiny. She does not take responsibility for her actions. She is untrustworthy, unfaithful, and wishy-washy. She is impossibly bourgie without being classy or fabulous. If I knew her in person, I'd want to bitch slap her, not learn her life story. I would not be able to befriend this girl. I tried my best to empathize with her, or to simply pity her, but I couldn't. The Piper of the book is different. She doesn't whine. She does recognize her wrongdoing, take responsibility for it, and then she even goes a step further to use the wisdom of her experience to understand how our "justice" system is broken and attempt to educate people by using her record of her experience to help those of us who have never been incarcerated understand that such a system warehouses people, but doesn't rehabilitate them, take quality care of them whilst it is warehousing them, or even help them develop basic life skills to survive "on the outside" to lower rates of recidivism happening on purpose because former inmates only feel able to survive as prisoners. She uses her unique position as "the prisoner who doesn't belong there" because of her background, and education to make the most of the fact that she has street cred both "inside" and "outside" and bridge the gap betwixt the women who are doing time and the clueless average American who has no idea what their experiences are like.

While Piper is a much more palatable protagonist in the memoir as opposed to on my TV screen, gone are the well-developed secondary characters who populate the prison and create most of the interesting backstory and plotlines. Kerman says that she maintained contact with several of the women she knew in prison, so I don't know if the creators of the show used additional information purposely not included in the book or gained after the book's publication to flesh out these characters (which, quite frankly, are the reason I kept watching the show), or if random dramatic liberties were taken. This is a question to which I would love to know the answer. Much more while reading the book than watching the show, it dawned on me that, if I were less my own person and more lost, I could've easily made the one bad choice she did and ended up in her position. I, too, am a college graduate, a female raised in an educated family with high expectations. I kept flipping to her author photo on the back of the book and thinking how much she resembled some of the super annoying coeds I shared a dorm with at Taylor. ...which reminds me of one of the best points Kerman made in the book about how, in some ways, she thought her time living in the dorms at Smith college prepared her for her time in prison. After all, both involve sharing personal space with a large number of women you don't know with whom you probably wouldn't have chosen to live. Both groups of women are under a high amount of stress, and are having to follow rules they might not agree with. Having lived in a dorm myself (and also spent a significant amount of time at sleepaway camp), I can see her point.

For those of you who have seen the show but not (yet) read the book, I will say that I was surprised at how little drama and violence were actually a part of Kerman's incarceration experiences. For example, the peeing incident happened, but not to her. She was never involved in any sort of physical altercation whilst in prison. She never cheated on Larry while she was in prison, and he didn't cheat on her, either (well, that is mentioned in the book, anyhow). She did encounter her lesbian ex (the reason she went to prison), but only when called to testify against someone else in the drug ring, not as depicted in the show, where they were dorm mates for an extended period of time. And she never did get furlough, not even to go to her grandmother's funeral, though she did apply. She never heard back.

I really wish the explanation of the title was included in the show as it is in the book. I don't want to ruin it for anybody, as it is an emotional moment for Kerman, but leaving it out of the show is like leaving the explanation of the title out of the TFIOS movie (oh, wait, that happened), or having a production of Fiddler on the Roof without the line about the fiddler. Just saying.

So, if you enjoy watching Orange Is The New Black, read the book. If you want to understand what time in a federal women's prison is like, read the book. If you want to read a heartfelt and smartly-written memoir, read the book.

[gali]

Duplicated topic

Piper Kerman