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Afterword True Stories about Prison “I haven’t read a book yet that wrote a true story about prison,” says Denise in her reading narrative. Although no single story can capture the diversity of women prisoners’ experiences, the women featured in The Story Within Us create a tapestry of important insights about women who are currently incarcerated in the United States. Read together, their individual narratives tell a different kind of story about women in prison. In these true stories, incarcerated women urgently seek to make meaning from their experiences and to situate them within broader contexts. As they reflect on their simultaneous roles as women, daughters, mothers, victims, perpetrators, prisoners, readers, mentors, and friends, the interviewees illuminate their full human complexity, thereby challenging the reductive stories that our culture tends to tell about women who have experienced or inflicted harm. Women’s narratives also draw attention to the ways in which our profound social problems—including gendered violence, addiction, mental illness , racism, and poverty—manifest themselves at the level of individual bodies, psyches, and relationships. In these true stories, “everybody [is] trying to get the next good book.” Women draw on available reading materials as sources of inspiration and guidance for rescripting their lives: for reinterpreting their painful pasts in ways that may allow for growth and healing, and for charting new ways of being in the world. In these true stories, prisoners also diligently strive to maintain vibrant intellectual lives in resource-poor environments . With remarkable resourcefulness and openness to difference, they use the limited books at hand to deepen their understanding of others’ experiences , cultures, and ideas. And in these true stories, incarcerated women eloquently critique the justice system, countering dominant narratives that allow us to forsake incarcerated members of our community and disavow the role that each of us plays in perpetuating the world’s largest penal system. The women featured in The Story Within Us thus tell a collective story that merits keen attention and compassionate response. I invite you, in these final pages, to reflect on the insights that emerge from the women’s stories. “Well, who takes care of you?” “Well, who takes care of you?” is a question that Bobbie introduces when she is describing how she has been taking care of others since she was a very small child. Bobbie recounts that she struggled to answer the question when someone posed it to her, responding, “I don’t know. I think I do. I’m not sure.” The narratives featured in The Story Within Us have helped me to understand how this seemingly simple question can assume great complexity for many women in prison. As women reflect on their experiences as children and adults—trying to come to terms with relationships that are often layered and highly complex—they draw attention to myriad factors that have shaped their ability to care for their own and others’ needs. Lending depth and texture to abstract concepts such as abuse, cycles of violence, victim, and perpetrator, the interviewees illuminate how experiences of sustaining and inflicting harm almost always go hand-in-hand. Furthermore, they model the difficult work—including forgiving oneself and others—involved in salvaging relationships marred by inadequacies in giving and receiving care. By thus highlighting women prisoners’ full complexity as human beings, the featured narratives counter dehumanizing stories that allow us, as a society, to relinquish care for those who fill our nation’s prisons. On one level, “Well, who takes care of you?” speaks to the fact that many incarcerated women “skipped over childhood” because they had to play the role of parent when they were children. As several women’s narratives reveal, intergenerational cycles of abuse, violence, addiction, and mental illness profoundly shaped their parents’ ability to care for their own and their children’s needs. The complexity of such parent/child relationships seems evident, for instance, in Olivia’s layered description of her father as someone who at once shared and enabled her addictions, opened his door for her every time she was seeking refuge from abuse, and encouraged her by his example as an avid reader and public library patron. Such complexity likewise seems evident when Audrey says of her mother, “I think I respect her a little bit more than I love her, because . . . she raised all six of us by herself. And I seen her go through hell with my stepdaddy beating on her . . . and they went all over her when she was little.” Like...

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