As a girl, she followed her father around, joyfully doing yard work and learning how to fix cars while he taught her his philosophy of living. But when she came out during her senior year of high school, he ordered her out of the house, yelling, “I ain’t raising no gay bitch!” (He never formally apologized, but they gradually worked it out. “I’m proud of Pops, he’s proud of me, and we’re finally at peace,” she writes.)
Griner, ably assisted by her co-writer, Michelle Burford, describes the Russian penal system — the filth, the interrogations by prison psychiatrists about her sexuality and her supposed drug addiction, the guards’ casual cruelty — in vivid, conversational language. After months in detention, she was sent to Corrective Colony No. 2 in Mordovia, more than 300 miles from Moscow. There she was assigned to “a military uniform sweatshop” and forced to toil for 10 or more hours a day — with no bathroom breaks and only 20 minutes for lunch — slicing pieces of fabric with a rusty blade that had already claimed some of her fellow prisoners’ fingers.
Once, the power shut off for three days in winter and the temperature plummeted; she fell ill and her dreadlocks froze. She slept on a bed that was too short for her 6-foot-9 frame, her legs dangling over the end. Several prisoners befriended her, translating what the guards were saying and buoying her spirits, but often she felt defeated and despairing.
In the end, she was lucky. An army of supporters, including her wife, Cherelle; her agent; her teammates; the W.N.B.A.; and finally President Biden himself worked for her release. Sentenced to nine years in prison, she was incarcerated for 10 months before being released, swapped for the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was serving a 25-year sentence in the United States. Re-entry has been hard, and Griner movingly describes the lingering effects of her ordeal, now tempered by the news that Cherelle is expecting the couple’s first child.
Reading this sobering account, you can’t help but think about Aleksei Navalny, the Russian dissident who recently died in prison there — and about the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and other Americans still being held there and in other countries. Their names appear in a list at the end of the book.
Coming Home | Brittney Griner | with Michelle Burford | Knopf | 320 pp. | $30
