The show is really great, filled with strong female characters and peppered with laugh-out-loud humour. The book is an interesting read, but obviously - because it's REAL - it lacks Hollywood finesse. Piper is not as innocent or as beautiful as her television self, her ex-girlfriend isn't a hot, glowering sexual nemesis, and the other characters lack the charm delivered by the small screen. It's a memoir. If you want more of what the TV show provides, reading this book will not fulfill that need.
For those of you who haven't yet accessed this show on Netflix (and if you haven't, go and do it right now!), this is the true story of a white, middle class, educated woman in her 30s who is sentenced to a year in jail for a drug offence she committed during a post-college experimental phase ten years earlier. Piper is sent to a low security facility, leaving behind her fiancé, her friends and her family. Her memoir is fascinating because she doesn't fit the mould of what we imagine a typical prison-inmate to be. This won't be a surprise to anyone, but most of the female prison population - as described by Kerman, anyway - is made up of low-income, uneducated women of colour. Not because white educated women do not commit crimes, but because for various reasons they tend not to be incarcerated for those crimes as often as their less privileged sisters. As an educated, middle-class reader myself (clearly the type of reader Kerman expected / hoped to attract), it is easy to identify with Piper, and therefore to share her discomfort as she ekes out an existence in such foreign surroundings. It is easy, shall we say, to imagine that we might one day fall subject to the same fate, and that is a scary thought. It makes the read exciting, in some voyeuristic kind of way.
Kerman's anger at the inherent injustices of the current prison system and the lack of equality in the way women from different backgrounds are treated shines through much of her writing. She clearly intends for this to be a polemic of sorts, to make people in broader America aware of the absurdity of a system where low-income women consistently do serious time for petty crime at a heavy cost to the tax-payer, frequently becoming institutionalized and therefore ceasing being able to function as citizens upon release. In order to shore up her argument in this regard, Kerman drops frequent statistics into the narrative. I admire her social conscience but it changes the tone of the book and the statistics are presented without adequate citations or sociological context. Because she tries to write both a diverting narrative and a social diatribe, she ends up doing neither well. As a result of the frequent statistics, the story gets bogged down and there were times when I was bored. Yet the book alone is not sufficiently researched to stand alone as a treatise on the prison system in the United States.
The TV version of Kerman's book makes a social statement without statistics, by providing back story for the characters who are Kerman's fellow inmates, and revealing the hardships that have landed them in their current position. The viewers sympathize with and grow attached to these characters who are merely peripheral in the book. The effectiveness of the show lies in its ability to make viewers laugh at Piper's naiveté and the juxtaposition of her home life against her prison life whilst simultaneously moving us with poignant moments of sadness and futility.
Kerman talks about her fellow inmates in the book, too, but it is generally done from the standpoint of her relationship with them. She doesn't focus enough on describing each of the characters she introduces so that they are distinguishable from one another by name. I often felt quite lost when she referred back to one or other of them.
I did enjoy the way that Kerman's vocabulary and mode of speech changes throughout the book so that by the end it's clear she has evolved as a person during her time behind bars. And I think the story itself is compelling and quite horrifying. It's certainly worth a read, but if you were choosing between the book and the TV show, I would say the TV show is the more enjoyable form of the story (although obviously the book is the more authentic, and it depends what you are after).
Overall assessment: 2.5 out of 5.
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