Why I Turned to Fiction to Tell the Truth About Prison

In 2021, I read about Antonia Ashford, a warden who killed her abusive husband after a deadly argument: She shot him point blank in the face.

I knew of other crimes too awful to imagine—setting someone on fire or killing one’s child—the horrors that came from a life of tragic losses, poverty, and family trauma. I had worked with women behind bars, directed eight plays in the women’s prison in Massachusetts, and written about that work. I’d reported on probation, parole, and prison conditions for more than 30 years. I knew that prisons no longer asked women, “Were you abused?” but now asked, “When did the abuse start?”  

But still. Antonia had been a warden, the keeper of the kept. How could she do that, I wondered, shoot someone in the face? This haunted me.

Then, I saw Antonia’s photo—a being so pained, she seemed smashed down—with bruised skin, eyes sunken, and mouth sealed shut. A woman who’d had enough.

I started keeping notes, searching day after day for articles, hoping to see what had happened to the warden who’d run a New York jail. But all I could uncover was that she’d been charged with murder and was held behind bars. I could find nothing after her arraignment. There was barely anything about her life as a wife and mother—her son had said these arguments between his parents were violent and frequent—but nothing that revealed how she felt about what she had done. How, I wondered, had she come to say this aloud to the arresting officer?: “It was either him or me.”

Not only did I question why this woman would kill her husband, but equally pressing to me, what would happen to her behind bars when she was forced to live with those she had jailed?

I knew the press would frame my questions in ways that trivialized the suffering Antonia had been through. “Had she been driven to kill?” would be the cliché batted around in the news. Pop culture is no better, portraying women who commit such crimes as “girls” gone wrong, i.e. “Bad Girls” (UK). Youtube gives us Prison Girls: Life Inside America’s Toughest Women’s Prison, as if women are waiting around to knife each other. Even the famed series, Orange is the New Black, seduces watchers with titillation, exaggerating battles and sexualized relationships between guards and prisoners.

The public focuses on the victims of crime, understandably so, but few realize that those who perpetrate crimes have often been victimized. We ignore the real struggles that women, most with histories of abuse, face behind bars, and the trauma of living locked up—guarded mostly by men.

For starters, 70% of correction officers (COs) in women’s prisons are male. And if someone asks you if you want to make a phone call to your daughter, skip the line, and come into their private office to use the phone, what would you do? Locked away for years from your family, would you jump at the chance, even if it meant taking off your shirt to let the guard see your breasts?

In 2022, women behind bars at the Federal Correctional institute in Dublin, California, coerced in such ways into sex with COs, the warden, and even the chaplain, initiated a massive campaign which was brought to the free world by the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and Centro Legal de la Raza. The goal was to stop rampant abuse by those in charge at the facility. This was far from pop culture’s image of prison. What the prisoners had coined “The Rape Club” was exposed. Ultimately, more than 300 women filed sex abuse charges by 2025, and the prison was shut down. Shutting down one prison wouldn’t stop what women across the county face every day behind bars, but this was a victory.

These were the facts that lived in my head. And yet, I still didn’t have answers to my questions.

I decided I would have to write the story to find out.

Joan Didion once penned, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means," in a New York Times Book Review essay in 1976. I’d read that essay, taught that essay, but until I sat down to imagine Nettie, I never experienced its meaning.

The beginning of the book came easily as I pictured my Antonia—shoutout to Willa Cather—Nettie, standing frozen, holding a gun in her hand. She had just shot her husband. I saw the slant of her head, the shock on her face, the arm outstretched. This was different from the factual portrait of Antonia Ashford. I could see by the way Nettie shook and her pale face filled with incredulous eyes that she hadn’t meant to kill. Her husband had hurt her. I saw that too, just at the tortured way her mouth quivered when she looked at Roger.

After I created this scene with words, I wondered how she’d gotten the gun to shoot him.

Then, it hit me. This character who was still a shadow on the page would have to tell me who she was and why she had killed her husband. I couldn’t tell her. She would tell me. I spent the next three years unraveling Nettie’s journey.

Writing fiction didn’t mean I abandoned research. Far from it. I talked to forensic psychologists, read up on the science of memory, and interviewed women who had spent years behind bars. I also had my experiences of working with prisoners to draw from. Knowledge gave me courage. I allowed myself to explore and to discover Nettie through the writing.

While facts are indisputable, or at least they should be, characters’ motivations come through their gestures, what they do and say, and what they do not say.

The only way to get the answer was to imagine the scene.

The Saints had been playing the Colts. On the jukebox, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. She had been sitting next to him on a bar stool, wearing a hot pink blouse, cut low in front, and black jeans. The Saints got a touchdown and she screamed, “Brees is a monster!” Then she’d dropped her wallet on the floor by mistake, and they bent down to pick it up at the same time. He spoke to her while they were upside down under the bar. “You are exactly the kind of girl my mother said not to bring home.”

Roger’s ominous tone should have been a red flag for Nettie but like so many women she “felt a damn tingle all over her body as he gave her the once-over.” Instead of booking it, Nettie stayed, giving him her “honeyed smile, the one she reserved for men she hated and adored.”

Damn Nettie, I often wanted to say to her, why didn’t you know you were digging the hole you fell in?

Because I could imagine one scene, I could imagine another. My theatre training gave me the skills to picture and my love of language gave me the words on the page. Nettie had lessons to teach me. For one, abuse is much more complicated than how it is portrayed on screen or in print. Nettie taught me that fiction reveals truth not captured in fact.

After I completed my novel, I sent it to Stacey Borden, a formerly incarcerated woman in Massachusetts who started a reentry program. Stacey was the kind of woman who would have reached out to Nettie, even though she was an officer, because Stacey would have sensed Nettie’s abuse.

Stacey wrote to me, “Stories like this help people understand that women’s incarceration carries layers of trauma. So often we are punished when what we truly need are healing centers, support, and restoration. Your book has the potential to open hearts and minds in ways policy reports never could.”

Writing a novel was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I had to learn how to connect one story to another and figure out pacing. These were not challenges I faced in nonfiction. They took writing and rewriting and more rewriting. But the joy of living in a world I created outweighed the struggle.

When people ask me if I’ll write another novel, I tell them to send me a story they can’t believe, a fact that seems outrageous, or a description of a real person who fascinates them. Then, I’ll see if I must write to find out what any of it means.

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