In 2003, Wally Lamb published Couldn’t Keep It to Myself, a collection of essays by the students in his writing workshop at the maximum-security York Correctional Institution, Connecticut’s only prison for women. The New York Times described the book as Gut-tearing tales … the unvarnished truth.

Now Lamb returns with I’ll Fly Away, a new volume of intimate, searching pieces from the York workshop. These portraits, vignettes, and stories depict with soul-baring honesty how and why women land in prison-and what happens once they get there. The stories are as varied as the individuals who wrote them, but each testifies to the same core truth: the universal value of knowing oneself and changing one’s life through the power of the written word.