Michele Weinstat Miller: Author and General Counsel of The Fortune Society

We were honored to host Michele Weinstat Miller, novelist and general counsel of The Fortune Society, as our May 2024 White Collar Support Group Tuesday Night Speaker Series presenter. Michele joined us a few weeks after her fourth novel came out, and rather than talk about the book she gave us the long version of a story most people only ever hear the ending of. You can watch the full recording above.

Most of us arrive here certain that our own case is the worst thing that ever happened to anybody. Michele files a few months on Rikers Island under lucky, and she says so from the basement of a building where her neighbors did thirty and fifty years. If you are early in your case, or years past it and still waiting to feel whole, that hour is worth taking.

Why Michele counts a few months on Rikers as lucky

Michele did not join us from a conference room. She spoke from the basement of a building where the residents are people coming home from prison, transitional housing on one side and supportive housing connected next door. In that building alone, she told us, there were probably a dozen people who had served more than thirty years before they got there, the kind of sentence Adam Bentley Clausen came home from. Those are the men and women Building A New Life After Prison is written for, and they are her clients.

That is the frame she chose for her own story.

I count myself as lucky as only having done a few months, a couple of times on Rikers Island

Then she added the part that lands harder. Friends of hers who did decades upstate tell her they are scared of Rikers. Nobody in that basement is running a comparison of suffering. But for those of us who show up to our White Collar Support Group meeting certain we were handed the worst outcome in the room, hearing a lawyer call a few months on Rikers the easy part of her life does something useful. She is also the working version of the case Louis L. Reed brought our group, that the people this system processed are the ones best equipped to rebuild it.

Building a law career and an addiction at the same time

This is where our members started recognizing themselves, and it is the part no law firm biography would carry.

Michele was using on the street at 13. She got herself together at 15, after being raped at knifepoint and after sustained sexual abuse, a sentence she delivers quickly and then moves past. What she did next she puts plainly.

I pulled myself together and I decided I was going to prove to everybody that I was not the screw-up that they thought I was.

It worked, on paper. She was out of high school by 16 and into NYU Law at 19, city champion in roller disco, black belt in karate, building a resume at the speed of a tornado. Nobody had told her that addiction meant abstaining from all of it, not just the drug that got her in trouble, so she kept, in her own phrase, switching seats on the Titanic. Then came the big firm, taken for the prestige points, doing work she hated, when the place she thinks she would have enjoyed was the Legal Aid Society. Her father died during her first year there. She was 22, and the floor came out.

Achievement as a way of outrunning something is a shape this group knows. Brian Cuban has described the same mechanics from inside the same profession.

What recovery has to do with her crime novels

I asked her the question novelists get asked politely and answer politely. Are the books therapeutic, or is that something readers just assume?

She did not hedge. The first draft of The Lower Power was written a long time ago and was very, very cathartic. It is set uptown, where she got clean, and it holds both the good of that stretch and the fear of being pulled backwards. The rest of the books circle the same drain, people unjustly accused, people dragged toward a life they were trying to live away from.

I mean, they’re about like my crime novels particularly, I always say that, you know, resentments are the biggest fuel for my novels.

She went book by book on where the fuel came from, including one that grew out of a death in the family and one that strands alcoholics and adult children of alcoholics together in a zombie apocalypse. Then she named the problem a crime novelist runs into after enough years of working the program, and it is funnier in her voice than in mine.

Michele has 34 years in the program I have 22 in. Two decades ago my home group drove to a meeting in Mount Vernon where the rules were no cursing and nothing but alcohol, and when the speaker started in on his coke habit they cut the lights on him and left us in the dark. That was hardcore recovery then. Watching it give way to the honesty about shame that Tony Dominguez and others bring now is most of why this conversation went where it did.

About Michele Weinstat Miller

Michele W. Miller is the author of four novels: The 13th Step: Zombie Recovery, Widows-in-Law, Gone by Morning, and The Lower Power, released in spring 2024. She is the former chief government ethics prosecutor for New York City and now general counsel of the nonprofit that provides reentry services to formerly incarcerated New Yorkers. She has overcome addiction, homelessness, and incarceration. Lawrence Block, the New York Times bestselling author, says she has had more lives than a cat, and that they have made her a writer of passion and substance. She spoke on our panel at the American Bar Association Criminal Justice Conference in November 2022.