BookBrowse Reviews Corrections in Ink by Keri Blakinger

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From the suburbs to athletic competition to New York prison: After her figure skating dream fell apart, Cornell student Keri Blakinger was arrested for felony heroin possession.

Keri Blakinger wanted to be proud of herself. In the ninth grade, after years of persistence and practice, she mastered the triple salchow and the triple toe loop. But she catastrophized, not believing she deserved figure skating success. Sure, she had executed the jumps, but she didn't feel them instinctively and knew the skill was fleeting, not wired in her muscle memory. She focused on training harder.

Two years later, she competed at the United States Figure Skating Championships, known as "Nationals." Keri was encouraged by a fifth place showing, but her partner, Mark Ladwig, was dissatisfied and abruptly quit their pairing. "His ambition," she writes in Corrections in Ink, "had become my Olympic-sized tragedy." (Ladwig went on to participate in the 2010 Winter Olympics with Amanda Evora and finished tenth. The pair would win two US National silver medals.)

Her consolation prize, from her parents, was Harvard Summer School. But away from home, she fell into a sickly depression as she relived Ladwig's rejection over and over. Snorting lines of Adderall, smoking pot and sucking down ecstasy until it numbed her failure became her norm. Keri erased who she had been, trashed every goal she once had. "Instead of getting myself together," she writes, "I fell further apart, propelled by more self-hatred than I knew I had."

While Corrections in Ink is an immersive account of an athlete dealing with self-loathing, it also clarifies addiction for the untutored: It's not about what you do to yourself but rather how you feel about yourself. When Keri was competing, she was also vomiting and starving herself. But once her figure skating dream crashed, she was still self-harming. Throughout her sadness, her parents acted appropriately, sending her to therapists and nutritionists, but their intervention, the way Blakinger remembers it, fell short. She recounts her mother hearing her vomiting a stir fry dinner she had recently eaten and saying, "I heard you." Her shame blocked out what her mother said next.

Keri's story took a disturbing turn when, while a student at Cornell University, she was arrested for possessing $150,000 worth of heroin and ended up in Tompkins County Jail. She had been that once upon a time figure skater from the suburbs. Now she was notorious, a heroin addict and dealer, spied on by prison guards whenever she removed her tampon.

Blakinger's memoir, which reflects on both her own prison experience and the prison system in general, notes that black people are overrepresented in the overall inmate population, but weren't in Tompkins, a very white space. While Keri tried her best to adjust, Tompkins was still jail, a friable place with inconsistent medical care, spotty legal advice and capricious punishments. And women from a variety of circumstances were thrown together in a peculiar mix.

There was Tawny, a heroin addict who looked like Katy Perry and was frequently in the system. Susan, a lesbian in her 60s, had done tours in the Merchant Marines and had a lot of DUIs. Brandy was a rule breaker, a resentful, loud-talking, obscenity-throwing hell raiser. Theresa was Blakinger's first "cellie" but was transferred rather quickly and followed by Deb, a nervy alcoholic who lacked remorse. Jenny, a crosswording partner of Keri's, had a keen wit and knew "how to jail."

Also appearing in Blakinger's memoir are the men she met at various times in her life, some of whom enabled her drug use leading up to her time in prison, her behavioral co-conspirators. Geeky Teflon taught Keri the ropes of being a dealer, leading her to discover it was better than turning tricks. She was in love with Hootie for three years: He introduced her to Saturday Night Live and the rapper Ice Cube; she introduced him to heroin. After Hootie broke up with her, his mother suggested Keri apply to college again. She did: Cornell. Todd was an angry, crack-loving boyfriend she couldn't stop fighting with. They sold heroin together. Alex was a fragile drug addict she married while in prison who was 14 years older than her.

None of the men she loved could save her once she was behind bars. Anxiety was her companion. Ever watchful of her release date, and terrified of being thrown into solitary, Keri artfully limped through her days, trying not to be noticed. In one jail, she was someone's girlfriend. In another, someone's confidant. She learned how to create makeup out of colored pencils and to hoard toilet paper. She dreaded her hair with glue and then had it cut off against her will.

Early in the book, Blakinger recounts trying to kill herself, while depressed, by jumping off a bridge, a 98-foot drop. It was a reckoning of sorts, an attempt to dissolve her body because her soul was dead. By sheer luck, she recovered with her life intact, a metaphor for the prison experience yet to come: Deadly but survivable.

We're conditioned to believe that athletes can overcome their failures through willfulness, but Blakinger reminds us that some have a spotty relationship with themselves. She spent years self-loathing partly because she never internalized the idea of losing with grace. Losing, for her, was an indictment of her shortcomings, and while that is part of the narrative focus in Corrections in Ink, it isn't the whole story of Keri Blakinger, and it isn't the whole story of women serving prison sentences. A breaking of one's self can occur at any age, and Blakinger shows that what matters is having the fortitude and self-reliance to put yourself back together again after a life of blight and emotional pain. If some flowers bloom in darkness, women in prison can, too.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in June 2022, and has been updated for the July 2023 edition. Click here to go to this issue.