Corrections in Ink Literary Elements

Memoir

The memoir follows, all in the United States, Blakinger's life pre-college while she was a great, promising young skater. It then focuses on Blakinger's life after college, when her skating career has fallen apart and she begins to do drugs. Finally, it follows Blakinger's recovery and healing and her journey to become a reporter.

Corrections in Ink is told from the point of view of its author and narrator, Keri Blakinger.

The book has a number of different tones and moods: the book is at times exceptionally sad, repressive, unrelenting, unforgiving, and occasionally, hopeless. It is also sometimes hopeful, oftentimes warm and uplifting, and invariably raw and emotional.

Blakinger is the protagonist of her own story; the antagonist of the story is the broken prison system in the United States.

The major conflict in the book revolves around Blakinger's struggle to deal with her skating career ending, her struggle to get clean, and her efforts to deal with (and later explain and re-frame) her prison term.

When Blakinger is finally released from prison and must begin her life anew.

Blakinger foreshadows her skating career falling apart quite early on in the book.

The extent to which Blakinger's mental health was impacted by her struggles in early life is sometimes understated in the book.

Throughout the book, Blakinger alludes to a number of things, including: religious faith, popular culture (including books, television series, cultural trends, films, etc.), figure skating terminology, academic subjects, social sciences (particularly things like sociology, the history of the prison system, and feminism), and drugs in general.

As Blakinger's skating career falls apart and she grows more addicted to drugs, she uses the same intense imagery she used to describe and give color to her skating career to describe her drug addiction.

Addiction and taking drugs is a behavioral problem that can be solved with treatment and other intervention, but is "solved" by sending people to prison.

Blakinger's story of addiction, arrest, and imprisonment is fairly common and is paralleled with the story of other women in her memoir.

The joint is used to refer to prison.

Addiction, including Blakinger's addiction and the addiction of some of the other women she met in prison, is personified frequently in the memoir.