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    Out of Orange: A Memoir
    Out of Orange: A Memoir
    Out of Orange: A Memoir
    Audiobook11 hours

    Out of Orange: A Memoir

    Written by Cleary Wolters

    Narrated by Barbara Rosenblat

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    The real-life Alex Vause from the critically acclaimed, top-rated Netflix show Orange Is the New Black tells her story in her own words for the first time—a powerful, surprising memoir about crime and punishment, friendship and marriage, and a life caught in the ruinous drug trade and beyond.

    Fans nationwide have fallen in love with Orange Is the New Black, the critically acclaimed and wildly popular Netflix show based on Piper Kerman’s sensational #1 New York Times bestseller. Now, Catherine Cleary Wolters—the inspiration for Alex Vause, Piper’s ex-girlfriend, friend, and sometimes-romantic partner on the show—tells her true story, offering details and insights that fill in the blanks, set the record straight, and answer common fan questions.

    An insightful, frustrating, heartbreaking, and uplifting analysis of crime and punishment in our times, Out of Orange is an intimate look at international drug crime—a seemingly glamorous lifestyle that dazzles unsuspecting young women and eventually leads them to the seedy world of prison. Told by a woman originally thrust into the spotlight without her permission—Wolters learned about Piper’s memoir in the media—Out of Orange chronicles Wolter’s time in the drug trade, her incarceration, her friendships and acquaintances with odd cellmates, her two marriages, and her complicated relationship with Piper. But Wolters is not solely defined by her past; she also reflects on her life and the person she is today.

    Filled with colorful characters, fascinating tales, painful sobering lessons, and hard-earned wisdom, Out of Orange is sure to be provocative, entertaining, and ultimately inspiring.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMay 5, 2015
    ISBN9780062394842
    Author

    Cleary Wolters

    Cleary Wolters is the real-life inspiration for the character Nora Jansen in Piper Kerman’s memoir and Alex Vause in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. Piper spent thirteen months in a Danbury, Connecticut, minimum-security prison beginning in 2004. Cleary, meanwhile, was charged with conspiracy to import heroin and served almost six years in a Dublin, California, prison before being paroled in 2008. Cleary has written poetry, fiction, and screenplays, the bulk of which were written during her prison sentence. This is her first memoir.

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    Reviews for Out of Orange

    4/5

    48 ratings6 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Halfway through and struggling to finish. Could have been so good but book told in far too much detail and too many stories about cats in a book about a different topic altogether! Disappointing as it could have been a lot better.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This was funny, informative, and why more down to earth than the book/series which was also good. But really great to get the non bells and whistles other side of the story. A good read and great audiobook for falling asleep
    • 4/5
      I had no clue Alex in OITNB was such a cat lady. Half this book was about cats, I kid you not.
    • 5/5
      It is a great book and definitly worth reading/listening!
    • 3/5
      The first half of this book is tedious to the extreme. You know the old saying about the fact that sausage lovers should never learn how the sausage is made. Well, when it comes to drug and money smuggling, Wolters describes every bone and piece of gristle that goes into the mix. She travels all over the world and we learn nothing about the countries she visits or what she did there except for one fantastic night in Bali with phosphorescent plankton. One would think a memoir would involve a great deal of introspection, but Wolters concentrates on the surface - we did this then we did that then we got this person to do this with us. Crime can be pretty boring when you get into the details. The second half of the book that talks about her incarceration, trials and release smf finally leads to information that people care about, a little exploration of her reasoning. To make the book even worse, I listened to it in audio narrated by the irritatingly overdramatic Barbara Rosenblat. With every utterance you realize that her motto is "I am an ACTOR!!!" Again, not the tone appreciated in a memoir. If this book hadn't been another take on Piper Kernman's Orange Is the New Black, I don't know if many people would want to read it.
    • 3/5
      When Orange Is the New Black became a hit Netflix series, the real person behind the fictional Alex Vause was first terrified of being notoriously known and later determined to tell her own story. This is that story.I read the book version of Orange Is the New Black many years ago and while it's tempting to compare this two works, I will try not to do so too much given that so much time has past. One thing I will note is OITNB was focused much more on the prison system and the reforms needed, whereas this book seemed like a more personal look back at the author's choices. More than half the book is an explanation/justification of how she got involved in drug trafficking in the first place. Given the number of bone-headed mistakes made, it's not surprising the whole "conspiracy" of participants ended up in prison. Wolters does also touch on how the prison system and probation seem to be designed to make people fail, but this is really only a few chapters of the book. While the content was interesting on the whole and kept me reading, this book really could have used some better editing. There were times when Wolters would go on and on about trivial things, like what they were ordering from the room service menu on an ill-fated drug trafficking trip (too late for breakfast so they'll have to order cheeseburgers, but said far less succinctly than that). Other times, she would skip forward so quickly that things like a supposedly very important romantic relationship is given only a few sentences. Several times it seems like something was referring to a passage that must have been dropped, or somehow just contained an error. For instance, at one point Wolters explains she hasn't seen her parents during the past two years of her incarceration; however, within that same paragraph she mentions her parents' "annual visit" and where in the prison complex she had sat with them the previous year. The end seemed a little flat, as Wolters fast forwarded so quickly and then only briefly mentioned her job and her sister's on the outside. (This book was a lot more "How I Ended Up in Orange" than "Out of Orange" in actually.) It's fair that she might want to retain some sense of privacy, but given the number of rather explicit details laid out elsewhere, that seems less likely. She also doesn't mentioned what happened to any other of the co-conspirators, although this may be due from lack of knowledge herself.All in all, this was an interesting enough read, and I would recommend this along with the book version of Orange Is the New Black for fans of the show to get a sense of the real stories behind the fiction.