Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison

Kerman starts the memoir by detailing the events of 1993, when she is 24 and in an airport in Brussels, attempting to retrieve a suitcase full of illegal drug money from baggage claim. She is carrying an African drug lord’s money as a favor for her lesbian lover, Nora. However, before this moment, Kerman recalls how she recently graduated from Smith College with a theatre degree. While her family was proud of her graduation, they were less thrilled with her major because they were “a clan of doctors and lawyers and teachers, with the odd nurse, poet, or judge thrown into the mix” (4). Kerman feels like the black sheep of her family, “a dilettante, underqualified and unmotivated for a life in the theater, but neither did [she] have an alternate plan, for the academic studies, a meaningful career, or the great default—law school” (5).

She has a self-proclaimed “thirst for bohemian counterculture and no clear plan” (5), and this attracts her to Nora—an older, wealthier, and adventurous woman. Nora takes Kerman out on a date and explains that she has money and travels a lot because she runs money for an African drug lord named Alaji.