HarperOne Publishes Memoir, OUT OF ORANGE By Cleary Wolters

Fans may have finished binge watching the third season of Netflix's Orange is the New Black, but they don't need to wait any longer for their next fix of the series.

HarperOne has published the eye-opening memoir by Cleary Wolters, the real Nora Jansen/Alex Vause. Out of Orange is the fascinating back story about the criminal activities that landed Cleary and Piper in prison, as well as what happened during incarceration and after release. And it's a roller coaster ride...

Cleary Wolters had thought her scandalous past was behind her. She was going about her everyday life when she saw a commercial for a new TV show that stopped her in her tracks. The scene showed a young blond woman hopping out of a van, wearing an orange prison uniform. A blur of words and images followed, including allusions to lesbian lovers, drug smuggling, and life behind bars. Then she saw a woman wearing her signature black-rimmed glasses and dropped the remote. In that moment, Cleary knew that her private past had been brought to light in the most public way imaginable and that nothing would ever be the same again.

Orange is the New Black went on to become an Emmy-winning cultural phenomenon that was streamed onto laptops and into living rooms across the world. Cleary watched along with the rest of the universe. However, what was fun binge-viewing for the rest of us was a weirdly personal, strangely unnerving interpretation of her own life, with the tall, gorgeous Laura Prepon playing the character inspired by her.

Now speaking out for the first time to share her story, Cleary tells a brutally honest, emotional tale of the bold decisions and epic mistakes she made, and the struggle to keep them from defining the rest of her life. As fiction and reality overlap, we see that the characters we think we know are only a sliver of the story, and that the real lives behind the stories we love can be just as addictively fascinating.

About the Author:
Cleary Wolters is the real-life inspiration for the character Nora Jansen in Piper Kerman's memoir and Alex Vause in the Netflix series Orange is the Black. Piper spent thirteen months in a Danbury, Connecticut, minimum-security prison beginning in 2004. Cleary, meanwhile, was charged with conspiracy to import heroin and served almost six years in a Dublin, California prison before being paroled in 2008. Cleary has written poetry, fiction, and screenplays, the bulk of which were written during her prison sentence. This is her first memoir and first published work.

Out of Orange
By Cleary Wolters
HarperOne, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
May 2015| $26.99| Hardcover| ISBN: 9780062376138

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