This article addresses the ways in which the prison experience of women in contemporary Zimbabwe is represented in both fictional and non-fictional texts. I will be arguing that the attempted reconfiguration of the prison space in Gappah’s novel is rendered possible through the prior exposition in the non-fictional life narratives of the external societal, economic, institutional and gendered prisons to which Zimbabwean women find themselves condemned. I will argue that the life narrative form adopted, whether fictional or non-fictional, offers a textual space for resistance in which women prisoners become visible and audible subjects of self-representation.