Bookstores abound with confessional memoirs by educated, upper middle-class white women. I will admit upfront to loving such books. I adore an easy read that takes me on a journey of self-discovery with the kind of woman I might meet in line at Whole Foods. Such memoirs are guilty pleasures because the reader doesn’t have to think that hard. We laugh a little and cry at the touching parts and. Upon closing the book, we return, like its author, to our cushy lives. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love set the mold for the genre in 2007. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild saw success in that mold in 2013. But Piper Kerman’s Orange Is the New Black breaks the mold. Unlike Gilbert and Strayed, Kerman does not recount a physical journey across space. Her journey was not her choice. The memoir discusses a year stuck in one place rather than one spent traveling. But it also describes an inner journey as powerful as that of any other chick-lit memoirist. The book is not an easy read. I cried more than I laughed. But I also opened my eyes to a new aspect of society. I pondered huge questions about freedom, incarceration, addiction and poverty. Orange Is the New Black seeks to be far more powerful than its counterparts. To me, it was. It succeeds by tackling political and socioeconomic issues as it details Kerman’s journey.
The title presents the juxtaposition between Kerman’s background and situation. The chic, upper-middle class author goes to federal prison. Her race and socioeconomic status make the author an unusual inmate. Orange Is the New Black confronts us with this. Phrases like “X is the new black” serve as symbols of the world in which Kerman lives. She populates an environment of fashion magazines and upscale boutiques. Circumstance thrusts her into the unfamiliarity of an orange prison jumpsuit. Orange Is the New Black tells a fish-out-of-water story. The title immediately introduces the fish and her waters.
The memoir recounts Piper Kerman’s year in prison. But it also tells how she got there. Kerman uses this story to illustrate just how lucky she is- and how unlucky most inmates are. Her Seven Sisters education, Manhattan apartment and stable career divide her from other prisoners. Most come from poor communities. They committed drug crimes far less glamorous than her own flirtation with international smuggling. Kerman and her neighbors’ differences create opportunities for humor, trauma and personal evolution. Most of all, her misfit status lets Kerman turn her memoir into a unique critique of American prisons. The writer knows her readers. They are the same privileged white women who devoured Eat, Pray, Love. There is a pretty good chance I will pick up any book whose title is some variant on “X is the new black,” and I picked up this one. The author hooks readers like me with her story of personal growth in an unfamiliar setting. Unlike most confessional memoirists, she does not look entirely or even mostly inward. Intertwined with her story are the stories of her fellow inmates. This narrative style allows her to present the major problems with the prison system.
Most of Kerman’s fellow inmates are impoverished women of color. They received a sentence to crime and incarceration at birth. The author’s parents divorced on good terms. They rallied around her after her arrest. Her counterparts often have absent parents, many also in the prison system. For many inmates, Kerman shows, crime runs in the family. “At present we had three sets of sisters locked up in the Camp, and another neighbor’s mother had apparently been shipped out right before I arrived,” she says (176). Her education stood in just as stark a contrast. The author received a degree from a prestigious college. Many other inmates count themselves lucky to get a GED in prison. She secures a job lined up for after her release. Her counterparts struggle to even secure housing. “I had written enough jailhouse resumes… to know that a lot of the ladies had only worked in the (enormous) underground economy. Outside the mainstream, they didn’t have the first notion of how to break into it,” she writes of a prison job fair (195). Her family and friends visit. Her counterparts’ loved ones often lack the resources. “Many families had managed to get the kids there from long distances- Maine, western Pennsylvania, Baltimore, and farther- and for some of them it might be the only time they saw their mother this year,” she says of the prison’s annual children’s day. (188). Kerman does not just have money and means other prisoners lack. She has a support system. “At mail call I continued to be blessed with an avalanche of letters, every one of which I savored. Some were from… friends of friends who had heard about me and taken the time to offer some solace with pen and paper to a total stranger,” she remembers (69). The author enjoyed membership in mainstream society and the mainstream economy before incarceration. She will return to them with ease, while they will remain foreign to many other prisoners. Throughout the book, when Piper described these advantages, I thought of myself. My parents would visit every week. My friends would shower me with books. Mere acquaintances would send letters, were I in prison. I would have the resources to reduce my time in prison to a blip on the radar- or a bestselling book. Few people are so lucky.
Kerman’s story alone would indict American prisons well enough. Her experiences alone would lead any reader to conclude that our criminal justice system is flawed. But she refuses to stop there. Her story mingles with facts, figures and analysis. She describes the night a fellow prisoner went into labor. Then she hits the reader with a plain fact which is even more startling. “In many places in the United States pregnant female prisoners are kept chained in shackles during their deliveries” (133). Kerman shows us what is wrong and tells us why. Over 90,000 other prisoners convicted of drug crimes were imprisoned at the same time as the author. It cost taxpayers over $30,000 per year for each of these 90,000 (138). But the author also offers solutions. The book even ends with a list of resources for those seeking more information on prisons.
But most of all, Kerman reminds us that those we isolate from society in jails and prisons are human. The reader relates to her with ease. Her experiences lead us into sympathy for less relatable prisoners. The author seemed to be parodying herself a bit with sentences like, “I hadn’t been so happy to put on a pair of shoes since I found a pair of peep-toed Manolo Blahniks at a sample sale for fifty dollars” (54). But I got it. I, too, have scoured sample sales and leaped with glee at a good find. How would I react to receiving a pair of government-issue work boots in prison, I wondered. My common ground with Kerman led me to wonder how I would fare in her situation. I can only sympathize from a distance with the average federal prisoner. I could empathize with Piper. Seeing “one of us” in prison forces the reader to stop seeing criminals as foreign. The reader must consider whether a minor drug criminal is definitely violent or even bad. The book contains no warm and fuzzy “we’re not so different after all” moment. The author remains aware of the privilege separating her from most other prisoners. “I knew that as many as two-thirds of all released prisoners are locked up again, a fact that mystified me at first- there was no way they would ever get me back in prison,” she writes of her skewed perspective (125). Wealthy and privileged, Kerman just could not understand recidivism. She is worlds apart from the two- or three-time inmates. But she depicts these prisoners as nothing less than human beings like herself. They experience joys and hardships. They are in turns funny and somber. They are human. As such, she argues with conviction, we should treat them with humanity.
Orange Is the New Black is funny. The touching memoir tells of the author’s personal journey during her year in prison. But the book is also a treatise on prison reform. The issue has risen to prominence since- and likely in no small part because of- its publication. A memoir penned by an upper middle-class fish out of water can fall into self-centeredness. Books in the confessional memoir genre often lack social awareness. Reviewers complained of this in Eat, Pray, Love and Wild. The authors darted across the country and world with little regard for any story but their own. The books entertained and touched me, but they did little to expand my worldview. But Piper Kerman avoids her contemporaries’ pitfalls in Orange Is the New Black. She tells the story of an entire prison, not just of herself. Simple storytelling is her most powerful tool. When Piper “grieved angrily over the insanity of locking up children, and then returning them to neighborhoods that were more desperate and dangerous than jails,” so did I (249). She makes an entertaining memoir an effective critique of our criminal justice system. The writer builds upon her critique with statistics and analysis. She humanizes her fellow prisoners and tells their stories. The reader not only sympathizes with these specific prisoners. The reader becomes convinced of the necessity of criminal justice reform.