by Kellie Edson
When I first watched Orange Is the New Black I was in a late summer haze the year that it first came out, a paper bag at my side, perpetually nauseous, pregnant with my first daughter. I had no context of what it was like to be in jail or prison nor did I have a grasp on my actual sexuality. Which – spoiler alert – isn’t straight. At that time, it felt just like a new unique and funny show to learn a little bit more about this incarceration world while wiling away the hours of that awful first trimester of pregnancy.
Fast forward 13 years and I am now very aware of my homoromantic-leaning bisexuality and am embracing living in a nested polyamorous relationship with my two partners. Recently, after checking off the list of rewatching Greys Anatomy and Dexter with my now wife, we turned to rewatching Orange is the New Black. Many of the early years that Grey’s Anatomy and Dexter were on, she was incarcerated herself so she never had gotten the chance to watch those shows. However, she was able to watch all of Orange is the New Black in one go post-incarceration – and in sobriety. Conversely, it turns out, I never actually finished the final season.
On re-watch I am struck by how much was packed into this show and how genuinely well done it was. As my wife and I watched it, as with anything that talks about incarceration, I want to ask her – is that how it really is?? About half the time she says no way, but there are certainly times that she will exclaim how accurate certain things are. “Those were the exact shoes we wore!” “That was my toilet for so many years!” or commenting on the ubiquity of drugs in jails and prisons and how they get in. In one of the later seasons, CO Hellman forces Alex to swallow drugs that are tied up in a condom to hide them during a time that they are tossing cells. I had already known how frequent drugs are stashed in the lower orifices, but I had no idea this sort of swallowing was something that really happens. Emily concurred – not that COs are going around shoving them down people’s throats as the fictionalized version depicts – but that people truly do this to stash drugs.
Emily has taught me so much about what it means to be incarcerated. Especially as an addict. There are multiple overdoses shown during the course of the series, and one in the last season – I’ll spare you the spoiler – was particularly devastating. This one hit home for me emotionally knowing that this was something Emily also experienced, nearly dying from one hit of meth that we now believe was laced with fentanyl. The stories of the abuse of the COs and how she was treated in the midst of that crisis break my heart even when it was a solid four years before her and I met. Now at almost eight years sober and working as a beloved professional drug and alcohol counselor, she pays her experience forward on a daily basis. Similar to how Tasty in that last season of Orange, even still trapped within the system that screwed her over, pays it forward by creating a micro loan program for recently released inmates. I’ve watched Emily walk several clients through suicide attempts and show up for these clients in ways that someone who hasn’t had their lived experience would never be able to. I am grateful that Orange is the New Black, while not always portraying things with complete accuracy of the experience of incarceration – not any more than the high drama Grey’s Anatomy has depicted surgery with 100% faithfulness – has given those of us without that experience a window into some of the travesties that those impacted by incarceration experience at the hands of a system that perpetuates the vicious recidivism cycle.
Last year I was driving home when I popped on an audiobook my friend had recommended, The Many Lives of Mama Love. Stuck in traffic, as I listened to those first chapters, I shot off a voice text to Emily: Oh my gosh, this person is talking about jail in Santa Cruz! Emily was born and raised in Santa Cruz County and spent time in and out of that jail for nearly two decades before she got clean for good. She replied asking who it was and after I fired back Lara Love Hardin, she wrote OMG You’re shitting me!
The Many Lives of Mama Love is a memoir and was the 2024 Oprah Book Club pick. In it, Hardin chronicles her journey from a suburban mother of four to a felon addicted to heroin and opioids. It turns out that Emily and Lara Love spent time in jail together ensconced within the very same G Block. Listening to the audiobook I was floored by this surreal experience of reading Hardin’s memoir and getting a new window into the world my wife experienced but described from an outside perspective.
Because of Emily’s experience, I have done a lot of work with The Enneagram Prison Project, having visited San Quentin with their group a few times last year, and this summer I taught English 101 for San Quentin’s Mount Tamalpais College. During our class, we read the “Sallyport” chapter from Hardin’s memoir and it was heartbreaking, but I also felt such privilege to hear these men echo Hardin’s experience of her first time walking into a jail. As they shared their free writes, they were very enthusiastic about reading a piece that mirrored their own lived experience and seeing themselves depicted in a piece of art. These stories are important and aren’t shared often enough in the larger vernacular of personal essays and memoir, media and art, and it is my hope that by choosing this piece and those like it to study during my classes, I can impart even on some small level to my students that their experience and their stories matter.
As with so many characters, in TV, film and books, I get very attached and invested in the character arcs and feel true sadness at certain deaths along the way. And what does great storytelling do if not to get us to care deeply about its characters? On this cycle of rewatching Orange Is the New Black, I am able to see it with new eyes. To see all of things that are left out. The intimate and heartbreaking moments that we don’t see in each of those characters and how incarceration follows them into their lives for many years beyond. How something as simple as being able to do your own laundry when you want to can follow you into your post incarceration years. It wasn’t until after six months of us being together that I got Emily to stop washing her underwear in the shower and hanging them out to dry on the curtains. This was a skill that she learned while on the inside, which became a fear-based compulsion even though the threat of no clean laundry was now well cleared.
From the outside, I’m sure many see Lara Love’s success as an Oprah book club pick as a huge overcoming narrative, but don’t see the grit and grime it took her to get there – just as people see Emily’s fully functioning life with a family, friends, hobbies and a career she loves see only that “after” version and are not privy to the intimate details that still haunt her on a regular basis. Folks who have been through incarceration have so many factors that contribute to their paths. A combination of trauma, often addiction, and sometimes poor choices put them on a path. But their stories to be told and held in our cultural zeitgeist. As the Orange Is the New Black theme song “You’ve Got Time” by Regina Spektor reminds us, we need to:
Think of all the roads
Think of all their crossings
Taking steps is easy
Standing still is hard
Remember all their faces
Remember all their voices.
May we truly remember all of their faces, and honor all of their voices in all of the incarceration media that is to come.
Kellie Edson is a writer, educator, Enneagram enthusiast, and mother living in Northern California. An MFA student, she is currently working on a memoir exploring her journey through polyamory, chronic illness, a yoga cult, and the unexpected places her lifelong search for intimacy leads. More at www.kelliejoy.com.
