Summary

In Chapter 1, Rachel Kushner’s primary narrator, Romy Leslie Hall, was one of 60 prisoners transported in the dead of night from country jail to Stanville Prison. On the bus, Romy noticed younger prisoners who were “whimpering and sniffling,” including a “girl in a cage who looked about eight months pregnant” (4). When a prisoner rudely told the pregnant girl to shut up, Conan, a butch transgender man who would later befriend Romy, came to the girl’s defense. Romy reported that she had “learned already not to cry,” in the two and a half years she had been in county jail since the crime that prompted her arrest (4). The details of her crime are not reported in Chapter 1.

On the bus, Romy sat next to Laura Lipp, a talkative inmate who, we learn, was convicted of killing her own child. As Lipp rambled and shared...