Piper Kerman on prison and Netflix.
The real Piper’s coming to town for lecture series
Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black
Part of: Unique Lives and Experiences lecture series
When: Wednesday, May 6 at 7:30 p.m.
Where: Winspear Centre
Tickets: $40 to $94 per adult, available at the box office, 4 Sir Winston Churchill Sq., by phone at 780-428-1414 or online at winspearcentre.com
Piper Kerman is the author of Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, a memoir chronicling her experience being incarcerated for her role in a drug operation.
An upcoming guest in the Winspear Centre’s Unique Lives and Experiences lecture series, she spoke to the Journal about her book and the hit Netflix series it inspired.
Q: Many people know you through the hugely popular Orange is the New Black Netflix series, which is based on your book. But there are major differences between the experience you wrote about and what’s portrayed on the show. Can you talk about having your real-life experience interpreted in that way?
A: The experience of reading a book is very different than the experience of watching a show or a film. Having been through the process — I am a consultant on the show — I now do recognize that film as entertainment is incredibly reliant on external conflict.
That’s what drives the pacing of that kind of a media, whereas a book can afford introspection that would be impossible to put on a screen. A book illuminates internal conflict in a way that would probably be pretty much impossible to do in another media.
I also believe that the themes that are most important in the book — themes of friendship and empathy and gender and power, and themes of race and class — are front and centre in the show. That is actually what is most important to me, not the storyline of Piper Chapman’s character in terms of whether it matches my own story. Q: Do you find a disconnect when you meet people? Do they expect you to have had the TV experience? A: I think what I encounter is curiosity. People understand that there are departures, and I think people are curious about the departures, even if they haven’t read the book. Obviously people who have read the book better understand the departures. Q: Larry and your mother are obviously very special people to you, and handled this situation very well. That’s not at all how they are portrayed in the show. A: Yes, people often ask me, ‘What’s the biggest difference between you and Piper Chapman?,’ and I would have to say the biggest difference, the most obvious difference, is what those characters of the family and Larry Bloom are like in the show, which are so very, dramatically different. My family has a good sense of humour about it, which is pretty amazing. Not just about the show, but the whole thing. They don’t think that mass incarceration is funny, and this experience was obviously an ordeal for them, but having come through it ... Larry also has a great sense of humour. He has a clear sense of himself versus that fictional character. Q: The themes of prison reform and social justice are an undertone to the show, but not in the direct way you laid out in the book. Do you worry that this message is being lost in the sex and glamour of the TV show? A: I think what the show does, which is so important, is that it establishes not just one protagonist, but an incredible cast of female protagonists who are fascinating and who are diverse in many different ways, and who we really root for, and who we really engage with. And, by the way, those people are prisoners. I think that is an incredibly unusual thing in mass media and pop culture. I think that’s a really different and important way of recognizing the humanity of people who are in prison or jail in the United States. Q: Why are the issues of social reform and criminal justice such a big part of the book? A: The United States has the biggest prison population in the world by far. It’s five per cent of the world’s population; it’s 25 per cent of the world’s prisoners. The United States incarcerates more of its people than any society in human history has ever chosen to do, and that is very recent. In 1980, there were about 500,000 people in prison in the United States, and now there’s about 2.4 million people in prison and in jails. Very disproportionately, that prison growth has affected poor communities. Eighty per cent of people who are accused of a crime (in the U.S.) are too poor to afford a lawyer to represent them in court. Very disproportionately, criminal justice systems have pursued communities of colour, and disproportionately people from those communities are punished. When we see applesto-apples comparisons, we see very clearly that not all Americans are being treated equally by the criminal justice system. For me, I hoped that a story I thought had the potential to be entertaining and engaging could also reveal some of those facts. Q: You’ll be speaking in Edmonton as part of the Unique Lives and Experiences lecture series. What message do you hope to bring to the audience? A: I hope the utility of talking about my own experience and telling my story is that everyone in the broader community — including people who are fortunate enough never to have the criminal justice system as part of their lives at all — recognize that they are part of the story. When we talk about the criminal justice system and when we talk about crime and punishment, it’s not ‘those people over there,’ it’s us people. These decisions of how to deal with transgression, how to deal with crimes that are serious, with transgressions that are less serious, those are decisions that affect us all, and not just “those people.” I think people come to that realization very clearly when they recognize the humanity of people who are going through the system.