The real Alex Vause speaks: 'Huge fan of 'Orange Is the New Black'

Despite its large ensemble of richly detailed characters, Orange Is the New Black is fueled by the crazy, nuclear-powered off-and-on relationship between Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) and her ex-drug-runner ex-lover-turned-fellow Litchfield inmate Alex Vause (Laura Prepon).

Trouble is, Piper Kerman, the real-life ex-con whose life story is dramatized in the Netflix drama, never had sex in prison with her real-life lover, Cleary Wolters.

Fact is, aside from a brief whisper of time when they were in lockup together during their trial in Chicago, the women never served in the same prison, Wolters, 52, said in an interview.

"The only thing Alex and I have in common are the glasses," said Wolters, referring to the black-rimmed retro 1950s specs that complete the rockabilly look that has earned Alex the nickname "The Bettie Page of Litchfield."

Vause returned to the cast as a regular this season after appearing in only a few episodes last season. All 13 episodes of the third season were set to be released on Netflix on Friday.

Based on Kerman's 2010 memoir of the same name, Orange Is the New Black enters the realm of fiction when it comes to the Piper-Alex relationship, said Wolters.

An Ohio software test engineer who is wrapping up a Ph.D. in information assurance and security, Wolters served six years in prison for conspiracy to import heroin at the behest of a Nigerian drug lord.

She tells her side of the Orange story in her own memoir, Out of Orange, published last month by HarperOne.

Don't get Wolters wrong, she digs the show. "I am a huge fan," she says enthusiastically. She found it surreal to see her personality so thoroughly morphed on-screen.

Alex is manipulative, mysterious, and "somewhat disturbing and compelling" as a character, said Wolters, who spent nearly 20 years caught up in the justice system since she was first arrested in 1996.

"But Alex is missing some key ingredient that makes us all human," she says. "We don't know anything about her hopes and dreams."

Wolters, who was raised in a stable, middle-class Catholic family, said she had no illusions about her days in the drug business. It wasn't a romantic time, she said. Just foolish and destructive.

Her dream of becoming a writer helped sustain her through the dark times. She's looking for a publisher for a trilogy of novels she wrote while in prison and is at work on a screen treatment for a possible Out of Orange film.

Wolters, who says she's on friendly terms with Kerman, said Orange Is the New Black forced her to confront her shell.

"The greatest struggle of all was busting loose of this shell I had erected for 30 years to keep my public and personal lives apart from each other," she said. "When the series came out, I was exposed almost instantly."

It forced her to face her criminal past and take stock of her character with an honesty she couldn't muster before: "Writing [a memoir] was a pretty tough experience because the only way you can bring the reader in is to expose them - and yourself - to the full truth."

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