Falling: Hard Lessons and the Redemption of the Woman Next Door

By Karen Andrea Campbell; 476 pages; Bookbaby; 2021
Reviewed by Michael Rene Zuzel, August 28, 2021

When Cynthia and I moved to Ashland, Ore., in 2014, one of our neighbors in the condominium complex was a tall, cheerful woman who walked with a slight limp and who, we soon learned, worked weekdays as a physical therapist.

A little later we found out Karen was also working nights and weekends in her small corner condo, writing a book based on her experiences during her six years as an inmate in a full-custody women’s prison.

Karen was surprisingly candid with us about her past. A suburban mother of two and an outdoor enthusiast, she’d been on a skiing trip on Mount Hood with her husband, Tom, one day in March 2003. On the way home that evening, there was an auto accident; Karen was driving, and she was intoxicated.

When she regained consciousness, Karen learned she had 20 broken bones. And Tom was dead. And so was the woman driving the other car.

After multiple surgeries and many months of physical therapy for her injuries, Karen was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and sent to the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility south of Portland. When we met her, she’d been out for barely three years.

Karen wanted to write a self-help guide for people like her who suddenly found themselves swallowed by a harsh, unfamiliar correctional system. Although she knew that Cynthia and I had both made our livings writing and editing, Karen never asked us for advice, never asked us to read her manuscript; she already had an editor who had been reviewing her work.

But I remember vividly the day I saw Karen in the driveway, and she vented angrily about that editor, who had just informed her that all this time she’d been writing the wrong book—that, rather than an impersonal self-help guide, Karen ought to be working on an intimate, revealing memoir, one that dealt directly with the horror of what she had done and her efforts to make it right.

“Falling: Hard Lessons and the Redemption of the Woman Next Door” is that memoir, a detailed chronology of Karen’s life before, during, and after her incarceration.

Her skills as a reporter are remarkable; throughout her confinement, Karen had filled notebooks and scraps of paper with notes about her experiences and feelings, and especially about the women inmates she came to know so well. Her writing is not flashy, but her descriptions are solid, and she is adept placing the reader at the always-unpleasant center of life inside a penitentiary.

However, this is neither a “Chained Heat”-style grindhouse potboiler nor an “Orange Is the New Black”-type dark comedy. (Regrettably, the publisher opted to include a comparison to “Orange” in the book’s cover blurb.) The drama here rarely involves physical violence; rather, the conflict in “Falling” occurs mostly within Karen’s mind and spirit as she comes to terms with her crime and the suffering she has caused to the families of her victims and to her own daughters.

“Falling” is also the story of how the very act of writing about one’s actions and experiences can help the writer—as much as the reader—understand what it all means. Near the end, Karen details her struggle with turning a self-help book into something so raw and confessional. There’s little self-pity here; instead, it is Karen’s journey from self-loathing to self-awareness—a journey she admits is unending—that makes the book so valuable.

Cynthia and I moved from Ashland to nearby Talent in 2016, but we’ve kept in touch with Karen. She came to several gigs when my band was performing prior to the pandemic, and since “Falling” was published in February I’ve emailed her several times to tell her how much I loved the book.

And to tell her that her editor was right.

Note: “Falling” is available from bookstore.org and alibris.com and in selected bookstores, mostly in Oregon. For more information, visit www.karencampbellwrites.com.