“To imprison a woman is to remove her voice from the world, but many female inmates have been silenced by life long before the transport van carries them from the courthouse to the correctional facility…. because [sexual abuse, incest, domestic violence] cut across the economic divide, women of all means are schooled in silence. Of the eleven contributors to this volume, eight have been battered and nine have been sexually abused, a statistic that reflects the norm for incarcerated women. Their essays, then, are victories against voicelessness—- miracles in print.”

This is a collection of autobiographical writing from 11 female inmates coming out of their workshops with author and teacher Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone, I Know This Much Is True). Eleven different voices and writing styles, stemming from eleven different lives, with one thing in common: a journey of the self from victim to survivor, from powerless to powerful, from broken to whole. And all done through the healing power of words, both writing their own and hearing the feedback from the group workshop.

Though often quite painful to read at times, the rawness of it is refreshing in it’s exposing of our common humanity. And the foreword by Wally Lamb is one of the best I have ever read. Probably because it shows him to have immense compassion and heart to do this kind of work.

I’ll share his closing:
“There are things [s]he needs to know about prison and prisoners. There are misconceptions to be abandoned, biases to be dropped. There are a heart and mind that need opening. There are many.
we are a paradoxical nation, enormously charitable and stubbornly unforgiving. We have called into existence the prisons we wanted. I am less and less convinced they are the prisons we need.”