It is the author’s story, so she must tell it, but the details can be jarring: We’re following her descent into heroin addiction when we’re suddenly reminded her parents were still covering her Ivy League tuition and rent.
These personal passages are plenty well-written, but competitive ice skating simply has little do with mass incarceration in America. She developed a serious drug habit, and engaged in sex work, experiences she describes with a bracing and destigmatizing openness. We follow her struggles with an eating disorder and the disintegration of her skating dreams. When she decided to pursue costly ice skating ambitions, her parents could pay. It was the sort of home where TV and video games were banned and her mother gave the kids “standardized tests for fun,” Blakinger writes.
Blakinger grew up in extreme privilege-her dad a Harvard-educated lawyer, her mom a Cornell-educated teacher-in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The chapters recounting her personal background may strike some readers as incidental or overlong. The bulk of Blakinger’s book is structured with alternating chapters that toggle between her pre-incarceration personal life and her two years behind bars. She has a knack for sparking small reforms and seizing elected officials’ attention. Blakinger combines an indefatigable empathy for the incarcerated with a pugnacious approach toward obstructionist officials and a transparent, engaging method involving tweeting out reporting tidbits seemingly round-the-clock. The book, Blakinger’s first, is a conversational, tragicomic, and at times incisive rendition of the author’s fall-and-redemption journey: from a well-heeled childhood and competitive ice skating to drug addiction, attempted suicide and incarceration, and finally a flourishing career in journalism.įrom 2016 to 2019, Blakinger emerged as a star on the criminal justice beat in Texas while reporting for the Houston Chronicle, and she continues this work today at the nonprofit The Marshall Project.
“I’m sitting on the floor of a crowded penthouse in Lower Manhattan and some middle-aged guy I don’t know is licking my feet,” begins Chapter Nine. “It’s the middle of July, but everything is frozen,” begins Chapter 11. “I have problems: I am out of clean clothes, I cannot find my glasses, my English paper is late, and my pockets are not big enough for all the heroin I have,” reads the Thompson-esque opening line of her 300-page memoir, Corrections in Ink, to be released June 7. Keri Blakinger knows how to write a lede.
0 kommentar(er)
