Essay Questions

What crime does the author commit which lands them in prison?

The story is a detailed accounting of the author’s fall from grace from the heights of pursuing an Olympic figure skating dream and attending an Ivy League school to spending time behind bars. What was the crime initiating this transformation? Keri Lynn Blackinger was arrested by police in Ithaca, NY one December night on charges of possessing almost six ounces of uncut heroin with an estimated street value somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000. It is not the crime which makes the story appear to be worth publishing, but rather the backstory of the author’s privileged background and the length of her fall from those heights.

What is shocking about the revelation of Blackinger’s age at the time of her arrest?

Throughout the narrative, the author narrates a tale that includes an almost unbelievable number of assertions and confessions revealing herself to be almost absurdly ignorant, or, at best, naïve. Right off the bat, for instance, she confesses to having smuggled a supply of heroin into jail following her arrest. Such a decision would be bad enough, but she then immediately writes that “it absolutely did not occur to me that bringing drugs into a jail could be a felony.” But wait, it gets worse: she follows this outrageous expression of ignorance by adding that she did not even know it was possible to be charged with another felony while already under arrest for having committed a different felony. Keep in mind that the author’s father is a Harvard-educated attorney. Her mother was a teacher, and she attended an Ivy League school. The most immediate leap of logic to be made here is that this arrest and incarceration all took place before that all that came to fruition when she was, perhaps, just an innocent high school girl. Well, no. This massive indictment of the value of an Ivy League education took place when the author was a twenty-six-year-old woman attending graduate school with a four-year degree already behind her.

What event which took place in New York City in 2003 is an iconic image of how white privilege follows the author even into her spiral to the dark side?

In a 2020 study on drug use in America, it was estimated that nearly one million Americans over the age of 12 had reported using heroin at some point over the course of the previous year. Not all of them could be considered junkies, of course, and among those who were, only a fractional few likely followed their addiction all the way to a penthouse in the Big Apple where men paid women to humiliate them at an organized event known as a fetish party. The author’s description of this fetish party in which an unknown strange man is licking her feet is just one of many iconic examples in the book illuminating how the same privilege which got her into an Ivy League school (and, later, this very book deal) seemed also to allow her experience as a heroin junkie to literally rise above the dirty sidewalks so many of her fellow users called their new home.