The book
Pretty in Clink
A memoir about the year I spent in a federal prison camp. Written in order, told honestly, and funnier than it has any business being.
In progress · No release date yet
Prettyin Clink
A Memoir · One Year Inside
Coming soon
Cover design in progress
The story
It starts with a phone call.
Then a date on a calendar, which is somehow worse. You do not get taken away in the night. You are told where to be and what time to be there, and then you go home and live a completely normal life until that morning arrives. You buy groceries. You answer emails. You keep an appointment for a haircut.
The book is about that morning, and the year that came after it, and the person who walked back out at the end of it — who was recognisably me and also, in a few important ways, not.
I kept expecting the movie version. What I got was a year of fluorescent light and other people's business. Cassie Will
Inside the book
What you are actually getting.
Four things this book does that the television version never does.
The waiting
Most of prison is not drama. It is time. Enormous, shapeless amounts of it, and what people do to survive it: routines, feuds, hobbies, hierarchies, and an economy built entirely out of commissary items.
The women
The people I met were nothing like the ones in the shows. They were accountants and grandmothers and nurses. They were funny. They ran things. Several of them were considerably better company than my friends on the outside.
The rules nobody writes down
There is a handbook, and then there is the actual system. Where you sit. What you do not ask. Who you go to when something goes wrong. Learning it fast is the difference between a bad year and a much worse one.
Coming home
Nobody warns you that leaving is complicated. You spend a year desperate to get out and then you walk into a supermarket and cannot handle the cereal aisle. That part is in here too.
How it is written
Funny on purpose.
I want to be clear that the humour is not a coping mechanism I am apologising for. It is the actual texture of the place. Women in there were hilarious. Gallows humour is what you build when you have nothing else to build with, and it is the most human thing I have ever watched happen.
So the book is funny. It is also, in places, not funny at all, and I have not smoothed those parts over to make the reading easier. Both things were true on the same days.
Who this is for
Anyone who liked the honest parts of Orange Is the New Black and got tired of the invented ones.
Anyone with someone inside right now, trying to picture the days.
Anyone who has had one year rearrange an entire life and wants to read somebody being honest about it.
And anyone who just wants a genuinely good story told by someone who was there.
Launch list
Be first to know.
The book does not have a release date yet. When it does, the people on this list hear about it before anyone else — along with the occasional chapter that did not survive editing.