Imagine turning on Netflix and finding a version of yourself on the screen. Same past, same crimes, same ex-girlfriend. Different name, better eyeliner. That’s roughly what happened to Cleary Wolters.
Wolters is the real-life inspiration for Alex Vause, the glamorous drug-trade girlfriend Laura Prepon played on Orange Is the New Black. The series was adapted from Piper Kerman’s bestselling prison memoir, and Wolters says she learned about Kerman’s book through the media, which pushed her into the spotlight without anyone asking her first. Out of Orange, published by HarperOne in 2015, is her side of the story.
That makes it an unusual kind of memoir. Most memoirists start with a blank page. Wolters starts with millions of viewers who think they already know her. So part of the book’s job is correction: filling the gaps the show left, setting the record straight, and answering the questions fans kept asking her.
The other part is the story the show only sketched. Wolters writes about how she got pulled into the international drug trade as a young woman, and she doesn’t pretend it wasn’t glamorous. That’s one of the more interesting things about the book. She presents that life as alluring precisely because that’s how it hooks young women, right up until the arrest. From there the memoir follows her through prosecution and prison, the women she shared cells and time with, two marriages, and her tangled history with Piper.
If you watched the series, you’ll recognize the outline and notice the differences. The real relationship was messier and less romantic than television made it, and Wolters isn’t interested in playing the femme fatale for anyone’s entertainment. The /books entry lists the book under both memoir and true crime, and that’s a fair description. It’s a crime story told by the person who committed the crime, with the benefit of years of hindsight.
There’s also a broader argument in here about crime and punishment. Wolters spends some time on what prison does and doesn’t accomplish, and on how a system can lock up the small players while the people at the top stay comfortable. It isn’t a policy book, but it isn’t just gossip either.
This one is for Orange Is the New Black fans who always suspected Alex got the short end of the storyline. It’s also for true crime readers who like their narrators unvarnished, and anyone interested in how it feels to have your life adapted without your permission. That last part is a very modern problem. Wolters may be one of the few people who has written a whole book about it.
It’s worth reading alongside Kerman’s Orange Is the New Black, since the two books sometimes describe the same events from opposite sides of a broken relationship. Neither one is the whole truth, which is what makes reading both so interesting.
A few questions for the comments. Did you read Kerman’s memoir, watch the show, or both? Does knowing the real story change how you see Alex Vause? And if someone turned your twenties into a television series, which actor would you want playing you, and which one would you be afraid they’d cast?
Publication details and subjects are on the Out of Orange entry in the Lesbian Bibliography.