Fashion is the least of Piper Kerman’s worries when she receives a fifteen month sentence for a decade old drug charge. Ivy League educated, Kerman misspent her post-college youth in Europe, where she agreed to pick up a cash payment for a drug-dealing friend. She seemed to think of it more as running an errand for a buddy than money-laundering. Eventually, Kerman tired of her aimless existence and shady friends and moved back to the States.
Ten years later, she is living a happy life in New York with her fiancée when the police knock on the door. Soon Kerman is trading in her comfortable apartment for a cell and the bizarre culture of prison life, where inmates earn as little of 14 cents an hour and toiletries like toothpaste are a treasure to newcomers. At times, prison is as awful as she feared, complete with strip searches and creepy guards. Yet gradually Kerman adjusts, finding small unexpected joys (illegal pedicures and cheesecake? Who knew?) Her eventual affection for her fellow prisoners is touching as is her epiphany that her offense, though nonviolent, was part of a larger industry that destroyed the lives of many of the women she comes to know and care about during her stay. If you’re looking for an offbeat, nicely written memoir, try Piper Kerman’s Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison.
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