White Martha Stewart Bitch

Merry Christmas, Here's Your Divorce

The last days of December settle over Albion with a heavy, exhausted quiet. After weeks of chaos and heartbreak, the Felonist turns inward — rereading her journal, confronting the grip of pride, covetousness, and “stuff,” and trying to make sense of the year she’s survived. Christmas arrives in her cube with carols, memories of her mother, and the ache of distance. And she gives herself one brutal, necessary gift: Bill’s divorce. A clean emotional break wrapped in newspaper — the only kind of Christmas wrapping paper you can get in prison. She moves through Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with small, steadying moments — PT’s visit, Nelva’s calls, Jen and Elena listening to her book in the gym. Grace rides Ricky Martin. The year closes quietly, with reflection, gratitude, and a fragile sense of forward motion. As she finishes her first Albion journal, she steps into 2015 knowing one thing: she made it through, and she’s not going back.

White Martha Stewart Bitch

December in a women’s prison is its own kind of violence,and that December in Albion is just horrible. In this episode, the Felonist reminds everyone exactly why she’s called the White Martha Stewart Bitch — sharp, stubborn, bitchy, and absolutely unwilling to be pushed around. When afight erupts over the hot‑plate and her hour to cook, she refuses to move, refuses to be bullied, and refuses to surrender her slot. The dorm erupts, the racial tension spikes, and the nickname resurfaces in full force. All over a couple of scrambled eggs. But the toughness is only surface‑level. A family Christmas card arrives — a photo of Bill and Grace without her name on it — and it shreds her. She spirals into grief and rage, crying through count, through calls, through the day. It’s her second Christmas in prison, and the card becomes the symbol of everything she’s lost: motherhood, home, identity, and the life she built. Then the rape squad stories surface. Rumors from another housing unit rip open her Rikers trauma and send her into a full emotional collapse. Panic, fear, and memory take over. Between the Christmas card heartbreak, the dorm conflict, and the ever present threat of sexual violence in women’s prisons, the Felonist unravels — spiraling, overwhelmed, and trying desperately to hold herself together.

Coin in the Basket

The Felonist descends into a fierce stretch of spiritual wrestling, filling her journal with pages from Julian of Norwich, Bonhoeffer, Rohr, the catechism, and every scrap of wisdom she can scrape from the silence. She questions forgiveness, marriage, self recrimination, and the wreckage she has caused. She wonders whether suffering is love, whether she must carry everything, whether she deserves anything at all. Shame, despair, and exhaustion stalk her through the dorms, the chapel, the law library, horticulture, and the endless snow. She tries to hear God. She tries to forgive herself. She tries to understand why she feels abandoned. Letters arrive. Packages arrive. Women unravel. Bill pulls away. Grace grows distant. She dreams of Ireland. She rereads Bonhoeffer until her head throbs. She copies Julian’s promise that all shall be well, even when she cannot feel it. She fights the belief that she is evil, worthless, unlovable. She shovels and shovels and shovels, all while crying. She prays for direction, for mercy, for a way through the bankruptcy, the collapsing marriage, the future she cannot yet see. And then, in the middle of the grief and the static and the spiritual noise, one line breaks through: when you’ve hit rock bottom, your very next breath is a coin in the basket. Coin in the Basket captures a woman clinging to faith, discipline, and the smallest acts of survival as she tries to trust that even in the darkest stretch, all manner of things may still be well.

Just Believe, Just Believe, Just Believe

A long stretch of November days unfolds in fragments — coffee, cold air, chapel, work, letters, interviews, apples, snow, and the constant ache of missing the people who once formed the center of her life. The Felonist drifts in and out of herself, writing in bursts, disassociating in between, trying to stay upright inside a place that feels both pointless and punishing. She forgives everyone she can name, even the ones who broke her. She meets with the Chaplain, remembers the rape at Rikers, and feels something shift. Packages arrive, small comforts in a world of half light and arbitrary rules. Grace cries on the phone. Bill sends turtlenecks. Women come and go — Jen, Franny, Carrie, Walker — each carrying her own trauma story, her own unraveling. She reads obsessively: Lamott, Rohr, Julian of Norwich, the nonsense of The Hunting of the Snark. She pulls Tarot cards, prays for signs, for clarity, for a way through the bankruptcy, the marriage, the future she can’t yet see. She rakes leaves and cries. She dreams of Ireland. She wonders if she has been thrown away like rubbish. She tries to understand the IRS man’s strange kindness. She tries to understand herself. And through all of it — the snow, the sorrow, the synchronicities, the spiritual wrestling, the endless shoveling — one refrain keeps rising to the surface, the only instruction she can hold onto: just believe, just believe, just believe.

One Does What One Can

A stretch of days at Albion turns deeply inward as the Felonist immerses herself in Richard Rohr, Anne Lamott, Iyanla Vanzant, and Thich Nhat Hanh, filling her journal with the ideas that begin reshaping her understanding of success, identity, faith, and self worth. She wrestles with capitalism, patriarchy, white male hegemony and radical dependency while delving into the compulsions that once drove her life — to be successful, to be right, to be powerful — and begins to imagine what it might mean to let them go. She prays, talks with Jerry, dreams in symbols, consults the Tarot, and reads until her mind cannot absorb another word. And then Lamott’s story about a sparrow doing the necessary – “one does what one can” -- steadies her in the middle of everything she cannot control. One Does What One Can captures a woman trying to rebuild her inner world while her outer life dissolves around something as small and seemingly ridiculous as a forgotten christening dress.