If you haven’t had the time to binge watch all of Orange Is the New Black yet, I won’t ruin it for you…except for the part about alien space monsters. Didn’t see that coming at all, did you? But seriously — if you haven’t watched the show and don’t want to learn how badass Sister Ingalls, the pacifist nun, or any of the show’s other ancillary characters real-life counterparts are, then avert your eyes, because some minor spoilers will follow.
Autostraddle bestowed upon the Internet a massive post about the intersection between memoir fact and television fiction in Orange Is the New Black. Piper Kerman’s prison memoir is obviously much different from its Netflix incarnation. For starters, the real Larry (Larry Smith, an actual working writer and founder of SMITH Magazine) isn’t a huge boner like the perpetually masturbating Jason Biggs character. “Litchfield,” the upstate New York low-security prison where TV Piper spends her 15-month sentence, is based on Connecticut’s “notoriously cushy” Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, which once housed the poet Robert Lowell, and is currently the idling place of Lauryn Hill. And oh, how observant of you! It is the very same place where Nancy Botwin did her time in between seasons of Weeds.