When I read Sebastian Horsley's Dandy In The Underworld a couple of years ago, I became so enamored of it that I ended up buying several copies just to give to friends. We'll, if you invite me to your birthday party in the near future, unless you're my grandmother, this is what you're getting. Like Sebastian's memoir, Some Girls is compulsively readable. (I put down every book I have stacked on our coffee table and plowed through it in two very busy days.)
Jullian recounts her childhood as the adopted daughter of flawed, but genuinely caring, New Jersey Jewish middle-class parents. Like many artistic and imaginative teenagers, she has aspirations of being successful in the theatre world. However, almost in spite of a lucrative internship, she becomes, seemingly in the blink of an eye, an 18 year-old New York upscale hooker, and within months is on a plane to Brunei to be an companion to the Sultan's son - the richest man in the world. She lands ass-first and unprepared as a member of his private harem. One of dozens of young international women who are kept sequestered and heavily guarded on the grounds of the Sultan's mind-boggling palace, she is technically free to leave whenever she wants, but doesn't. In fact, she stays much longer then her intended two weeks, even though she's subjected to one humiliation after another by Robin, her narcissistic, acutely sex addicted, misogynistic prince employer, and the insecure cattiness of the other harem girls. Her reasoning is simple - the money's just too damn good.
For me, this is where Jillian's book stands shinning above so many others in the contemporary, over-saturated, crank-it-out-for-the-cash genre of the memoir. There's more to her tale then just a vapid and voyeuristic romp through a world that most of us will never see, even from a distance. She provides the reader with a very contemporary moral question - Just how much does consumerism shape who we are? Not who we "think" we are, but who we really are when faced with grown-up choices, with serious consequences, that we're not prepared to make. Are you really the "do the right thing" person that you unswervingly empathize with in the movies when you've been offered a private jet to take you on bottomless shopping trips? Just how much of your core are you willing to permanently scar when you're handed a Louis Vuitton bag stuffed with cash? This is why I really want to give this book to my friends. Though Some Girls is a moral tale taken from an extreme situation, it's premise is food that everyone can chew. How much of your sanity will you sacrifice for that job that you hate? How much of your self-worth will you throw away on that lover who doesn't love you back? On self-absorbed sociopaths who you want to call your friends?
Jillian Lauren is now married to Weezer bassist, Scott Shriner. They have an adopted son.
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