FASHION Magazine

When Piper Kerman confessed to her friends that she—a self-described “nice blonde lady” living in the bourgie side of Brooklyn—was going to jail for laundering money for a drug kingpin, they laughed at her. It took weeks to convince some of her inner circle that her conviction wasn’t a joke.

Nobody was laughing when she was handcuffed and sent to a federal correctional facility in Danbury, Conn., for 15 months in February 2004, more than a decade after she committed the crime—a time she calls her wild, experimental 20s. Kerman’s past almost destroyed her relationships with her unknowing fiancé, friends and family.

“It’s an indelible experience,” Kerman says from her office in New York, where she now works at a communications firm. “It makes such an impression on you that you can’t leave it behind. I think about it all the time.”

While serving her sentence, Kerman was meticulous about taking notes, chronicling her fish-out-of-water-and-into-frying-pan story for what would become her best-selling 2010 memoir, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. The book’s newfound popularity has inspired a Netflix series by Weeds creator Jenji Kohan.

“The series is an adaptation, so there are some wild departures from the actual events recounted in my book,” admits Kerman, who was brought into the project to consult. “Some of the scenes are just as exciting or funny or horrifying for me to watch as they might be for other viewers.” An episode directed by Jodie Foster had Kerman recalling the sometimes startling, sometimes humorous moments she encountered while navigating the social protocols at her prison’s mess hall.

Actress Taylor Schilling was chosen to play Piper Chapman, a Kerman-esque character, for the series. Rather than imitate the woman she got to know behind the cameras, the 28-year-old Bostonian—best known for roles in Argo and The Lucky One—decided to find common ground between them.

“Being in [jail] is akin to learning the rules of a country club,” Schilling says during the shooting of Orange Is the New Black’s last episode in New York City. “This isn’t a show like Oz. It’s a different beast altogether.” Instead of portraying a violent, stereotypical view of prison life, the scripts emphasize the dramas surrounding class and status issues in prison.