One year inside. I came out with stories.
Cassie Will walked into a federal prison camp with a real estate license, a good manicure, and absolutely no idea what she was doing. Pretty in Clink is the memoir about that year — and the podcast where the women she met in there finally get to tell it themselves.
Book in progress · Podcast coming
Start here
Two ways in.
Same year.
One of them is mine. The other one belongs to everybody else who was in there.
The Book
A memoir about a year in a federal prison camp, written the way it actually felt: absurd, boring, terrifying, and occasionally the funniest thing that has ever happened to anyone.
Read about it 02The Podcast
Long conversations with people who have done time and come out the other side. No true-crime music. No pity. Just women talking honestly about the strangest chapter of their lives.
See what it is 03Who I Am
Twenty-odd years selling real estate, one year in a federal camp, and a lifetime of being told I talk too much. Turns out that last part was useful.
The whole storyWhy this book
Nobody writes about the boring parts.
Every prison story you have seen was made for television. Somebody is always getting stabbed in a laundry room. The lighting is blue. There is a montage.
That is not what a federal camp is. A federal camp is waiting. It is commissary politics and borrowed shampoo and forty rules nobody ever wrote down. It is grown women crying through a fifteen-minute phone call and then laughing so hard at dinner that a guard has to walk over.
I wrote it down because nobody else was writing that part down. And because if I did not make it funny, I was not going to make it through.
You do not get to pick the year that changes you. You only get to pick what you do with the story afterwards. Cassie Will
Cover concept
The book
Pretty in Clink
A memoir about a year in a federal prison camp, written the way it actually felt rather than the way prison is usually sold.
No redemption arc bolted on the end, no lessons the reader is supposed to take away, no pretending she was the only reasonable person in the building. Just what happened, who was there, and what turned out to be funny later.
What the book is
A year, start to finish. The phone call that began it, the drive in, the first night, the people, the rules nobody writes down, and the strange grief of leaving. Told in order, told honestly, and told with jokes, because that is how it actually sounded.
What it is not
It is not a legal thriller and it is not a redemption arc with a bow on it. Nobody gets rescued at the end. I am not going to pretend the year was a gift, and I am not going to pretend I did not laugh every single day.
The podcast
Everyone in there had a book in them.
I met women inside who were smarter than me, funnier than me, and far better storytellers than me. Most of them will never write a memoir. So the podcast is the other half of this: I sit down with people who have done time, and I let them talk for as long as they want.
No dramatic re-enactments. No host doing a serious voice. Just the conversation you would actually have at a kitchen table at eleven at night.
Stay in the loop
Know before everyone else.
One email when the book has a release date. One when the podcast drops. Occasionally a story that did not make the final cut. That is the whole deal — no weekly newsletter, I promise.