‘Orange is the New Black’: Topic is titillating, but book lacks personal introspective

In 2010 Piper Kerman was known to readers and booksellers as the author of 'Orange is the New Black,” a memoir detailing her year in a women's prison. In 2015, however, Kerman is known more for the wildly popular Netflix series of the same name.

Having never seen the show, I can't speak to the ways producers drew from Kerman's book. But it's easy to see how Kerman's story would be such a draw for producers, if not for readers.

The memoir is true to the title: She does explore her year in a women's prison, but she does so with a distance and style more akin to a travelogue than a memoir. There are long passages detailing her daily routines, the cafeteria, the bunks, the intricacies of showering, as well as nearly anthropological observations of her fellow prisoners: 'She was perceptive and sensitive but had great difficulty expressing herself in a way that was not off-putting to others.” While this is a description of a woman Kerman nicknames Pennsatucky, she easily could have been describing herself - or at least the way she is drawn in this work.

Since her release, Kerman now serves as vice president of the Women's Prison Association board and teaches writing classes at a correctional institute in Ohio. Her time in prison clearly had an impact on her, but it's difficult to determine that based solely on this text.

There are plenty of great moments: time spent with her prison 'family,” her success with making a prison cheesecake, how other inmates threw her a surprise birthday party that brings her to tears. But what's missing is personal exploration. Just when Kerman opens the door on something bordering on introspection for her past deeds, she quickly moves into larger, less personal topics, such as how our justice system has no provision for restorative justice and how our minimum drug sentencing laws have ballooned our prison population to staggering numbers.

These are important topics, to be sure. But in a memoir, statistics, editorials and descriptions need to be balanced with honest, personal introspection, otherwise it's not a memoir. It's just a distanced observation of others.