One of those, Diane Bartholomew, perhaps the most poignant of all the women, died of cancer while at York. Nine of the eleven women wrote their pieces while incarcerated. There is no melodrama in these stories, no “woe is me.” These are real women and they have real stories to tell. Over time, and over the course of Lamb’s instruction, each woman found her own voice: the words come bitten off, often carrying the salty taste of tears, the metallic tang of blood. “Long-term incarceration,” Barbara Parsons Lane writes, “is a strange mix of sadness, sameness, and explosiveness.” >From the disparaging cellblocks of York, comes hope and humor. So moved by the inmates’ words and the stories they crafted, Lamb “couldn’t keep it” to himself he felt compelled to compile and publish them. Lamb’s first visit led to a three-year stint.
His strategy gone awry, Lamb found himself teaching a creative writing seminar - not to convicts, but rather to women in search of identity, in search of peace. It just so happened that when York Correctional Institution phoned several years ago, Lamb was stranded without his handy dandy note card. In want of spending time with his family and his writing, Lamb tends to politely refuse such invitations, aided by a dismissive index card taped to his phone. Lamb, well known for his Oprah-endorsed novels She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much is True, apparently receives a multitude of solicitations each year to speak at various events around the country. “As an adult, I have stolen and paid the price,” contributor Carolyn Ann Adams writes, “As a child, I was stolen from, by a thief who went free.” In the face of a harsh environment, low self-esteem, self-destructive habits, obstreperous rage, and poor decision-making they ended up where author Wally Lamb found them - jail. Rather, such vivid and intimate portrayals remind us that these women are human beings first, inmates second.Īs each story reveals, the contributors were often sexually, physically, and mentally abused many came from abject poverty and broken homes some were faced with unwanted pregnancies while still in their teens. The book is neither a tabloid tale of the injustices incurred upon female prisoners nor a personal proclamation of innocence. It is an attempt to explain rather than excuse, to balance rather than blame. The collection, consisting of eleven personal narratives, illuminates the lives of these women – all of them harsh, abusive, and lonely - prior to conviction. “The eyes of others our prisons their thoughts our cages.”Ĭ ouldn’t Keep It to Myself is an inside look at the women behind the bars of a maximum security Connecticut prison, incarcerated for crimes whose breadth spans larceny by embezzlement to homicide in the first degree to manslaughter due to emotional duress.
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