Keri Lynn Blakinger
Since this is a memoir, the main character is the author. She is also the first-person narrator. According to a newspaper police blurb covering her arrested, she was a 26-year-old dean’s list student at Cornell University at the time of her arrest. The veracity of these specific details about the author is almost immediately called into question when she asserts without a trace of irony that it never occurred to her that smuggling heroin into the jail the very night that is arrested and booked into jail for possession of heroin could result in an addition felony charge subsequent to the possession offense.
The reader may well wonder out loud how a grad student on the honor roll at a supposedly prestigious Ivy League college could possibly have reached the age of 26 without at least assuming this would be the case. As it turns out, with almost every turn of the page from that point forward, readers are confronted with more information about Blakinger that serves to raise additional questions concerning the relationship between wealth and privilege and the necessary intellectual requirements for acceptance into Ivy League schools.
Although this is not a memoir intended to paint a positive portrait of its subject, it is not really the drug and crime issues which raise the reddest flags, but rather the issues surrounding the extent to which wealth offers unfair opportunities to the privileged over more intellectually deserving but less socially privileged members of the population.
Stacy Burnett
Stacy Burnett is a 38-year-old inmate the author meets at Albion Correctional Facility. She is initially introduced in the Author’s Note prefatory text preceding Chapter One in which Blakinger notes that while some names of actual people have changed, she uses the real names of both Stacy and her pet chicken. Stacy’s is a story of navigating through the rigid rules of prison when one is either natural rebellious or suffering from a mental health disorder. The pet chicken turns out to be a seagull named Henry who is really just a collection of pilfered fried chicken bones.
Significant to Stacy’s story within the correctional facilities is her life prior to winding up there. In fact, Stacy is perhaps unwittingly presented by the author as precisely the opposite of her own story. Rather than attaining the height of her own personal success prior to incarceration primarily through the fortunate fate of being into privilege, Stacy’s is the story of a fall from a self-constructed state of grace. Stacy had worked her own way up to the point of being able to open and run two successful Curves fitness studios franchises before financial desperation her down the path toward criminal activity in attempt to save them from insolvency.
The Lawyer
The lawyer who hands Blakinger’s defense is referred throughout only as “my lawyer.” He may be a composite of multiple attorneys or even, possibly, figment of her imagination. He is described as a “white-haired Southern man with a handlebar mustache” with a propensity for using phrases like “meaner than a two-headed rattlesnake.” That she also alludes to the play Inherit in Wind which features a popular film adaptation in which an aging Spencer Tracy plays a folksy white-haired lawyer only serves to intensity the possibility that this unnamed character is not representative of any actual individual person like Stacy Burnett. The lawyer just seems way too stereotypically ideal to actually be real.
Charlotte
Charlotte is the author’s dog the welfare of which she is left to wonder about when she is arrested and jailed. Assuming the worst when she receives no word of whether she managed to survive being left alone in the dirty basement apartment she shared with her owner, she eventually receives the goods news that property manager found Charlotte temporary residence at a very nice home. The real point of introduction Charlotte as a character, however, is the provenance of their coming together. The backstory of how the author adopted the dog so malnourished her ribs were outlined against her coat and so terrorized that the sound of her own bark scared her is really the story of what took place just a few days earlier. Her serious attempt at committing suicide by jumping from a bridge in Ithaca, NY.
