‘Orange’ fans enjoy writer’s tale
Like plenty of other fans of Orange Is the New Black, Barbara Haury can hardly wait for the third season of the Netflix prison drama to come out on June 12. • But in the meantime, Haury found another way to sate her Orange craving. • On Tuesday night, she drove to Westerville to listen to a talk by Piper Kerman, a recent Columbus transplant whose memoir inspired the show.
“I just wanted to see her in person and hear her story,” said Haury, 70, of Johnstown.
Kerman, 45, was happy to share with Haury and the hundreds of other people who gathered at Westerville Central High School for a sold-out event in Westerville Public Library’s “Meet the Authors” series.
“It is nice to be home in Ohio,” Kerman said to applause. “After about six months, I'm getting used to saying ‘home in Ohio.’ ”
Kerman and her husband, Larry Smith, moved from New York to Columbus’ Victorian Village neighborhood in January so she could teach writing at the Marion Correctional Institution and the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville.
She talked about that experience on Tuesday night and
explained how she wound up in prison in the first place.
After growing up in New England, Kerman graduated from Smith College and met a woman who persuaded her to transport drug money in the early 1990s.
Years later, Kerman was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison, eventually writing her memoir, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, which was published in 2010.
“I really hoped that someone would read it other than my mother-in-law’s book club,” she said to a lot of laughs at the Westerville gathering.
Plenty of people did, including Jenji Kohan, creator of the popular Showtime series Weeds.
So, when Kerman was in California on a book tour, she said, she met Kohan for lunch.
“It was a long, long lunch because Jenji asked me roughly 3,472 questions ... everything from, ‘ What kind of mind games do you play with yourself when you are facing the desert of your sentence and you have no idea how you’re going to cross it?’ And also: ‘Is there cheese in prison?’ ”
Her responses, she said, were enough to interest Kohan, who made the book into the wildly popular series.
“Not that long after that lunch, Netflix came into the picture ... and here we are right on the precipice of June 12,” said Kerman, who’s now a consultant on the show.
“I can promise you really wonderful things in season three,” she said. “I cannot deliver any spoilers. I know some of you came just for that, but it’s almost here, folks. It’s almost here.”