They included four pages of Blakinger writing about a fellow inmate trying to fake mental illness by collecting chicken bones and claiming they were her pet chicken. I read Blakinger’s memoir after reading that the Florida Department of Corrections had impounded the book, because the state prison system's Literature Review Committee found six pages of it objectionable. In her first story for the newspaper, she went to Mexico and bought pills at pharmacies there that were supposed to be oxycontin and Adderall, but were actually fentanyl and meth. She recently became a reporter for The Los Angeles Times. Writing about what she learned behind barsĪnd her work at The Houston Chronicle resulted in the Texas prison system being shamed into a new policy that gave dentures to toothless inmates rather than liquifying all their food in blenders. She wrote a piece for The Washington Post magazine about the inequities in women's prisons that was selected for the Best American Magazine Writing in 2020. She worked for a time at The Marshall Project, covering prisons issues across the country. All the while, she kept a detailed journal of her mental and physical journey.Īfter getting out of prison, she finished her degree at Cornell, and became an award-winning journalist covering criminal justice. Instead of graduating, Blakinger was sent off to a procession of women’s prisons for about two years. It led to her arrest on a felony drug charge during what would have been her final semester at Cornell. She survived a bridge-jumping suicide attempt but not the dark spiral of a debilitating heroin addiction. Her mental health issues got worse there. More: The Florida Book War of 2023: Trump, DeSantis battle it out for literary supremacy More: Cerabino: DeSantis: Proposed state license plate features warning to "out-of-state cars" More: Cerabino: Woke or joke? Trying to feel the pain of straight, white men Even with all the skating and an eating disorder, she cruised through high school academically and was accepted as a student at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. That led to bulimia and the end of her Olympic dreams.
Trying to make herself more petite for her male skating partners, she taught herself to throw up after every meal. It’s a remarkable book written by an Ivy League English major who landed in New York’s prison system as a result of a heroin addiction and eventually found sobriety and redemption.Īs a teenager, Blakinger ice skated six hours a day in a failed quest to be an Olympics figure skater.
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