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Just, kinda, eh. I mean, certainly some of the "behind-the-scenes" details of the Sultan of Brunei's younger brother's "party girls" were kind of interesting. But the book purports to be about the author *and* her experiences, and the part about the author -- who she is, why she took this gig in the first place, why she left, why she went back -- is just all over the place. There's no real story arc, and it's really hard to understand where she's coming from. It seemed like it was trying to be a...
I found this book sad and disturbing, bereft of any real point.I picked it up out of curiosity about Brunei and an abiding interest in each person's unique story, but finished it only to see if the poor girl eventuallyfound some sort of redemption. It seems she didn't.Jillian and her brother Johnny grew up in the middle-class non-observantJewish family into which they were both adopted. Both experienced troubledand wild teenage years. Johnny found fulfillment in God, becoming a devoutHasid. Jill...
Okay, so I know it's rude to judge someone's memoir, but if they publish their life story, I feel it's okay to judge them. They could just keep these things private if they don't want my judgements. That said, I was so totally disappointed by this book. It was lousy. I had expected something to be learned from this tale, or at least leave the book with the idea of "Now I am prepared!" but there wasn't even that in it. It was just one huge monologue on this girls' horrible life as a middle-class
I picked this book up for one dollar at a book sale. When I got it home and read the endorsements closely enough to figure out it was the memoir of a call girl, I wondered if I should just turf it back. Instead, I figured I could maybe pick up some useful info (being an author means knowing about a lot of odd things in painstaking detail) and dove in.As a teenager in New York, Jillian Lauren was a call girl with an internship in avant-garde theatre who called herself a feminist activist and clas...
I'll refer to an update I made when finishing this: "Varying degrees of disinterested while reading this. At times yawning, why-am-I-reading-and-more-importantly-what-am-I-reading. Then thinking, this might've been interesting, but the complete lack of reflection from the author makes this a long list of things she did in her late teens. Unimpressed by the writing too, weird analogies to jilt the prose." While I appreciate that this book never felt like it wanted to shock simply for the fun of...
This was a story about a very broken young woman searching for herself and landed as a prostitute. The cultural references to Brunei and the Prince were fascinating, the book was not particularly well written. I never felt that close to the narrator or feel she was a likable character. The relationships with the other women in the harem looked silly; which is hard to believe given the circumstances.
Why, hello there Your Royal Highness Pengiran Digadong Sahibul Mal Pengiran Muda Jefri Bolkiah ibni Al-Marhum Sultan Haji Omar Ali Saifuddien Sa'adul Khairi Waddien or, in short, Prince Jefri aka Robin (for the ladies). Wow, this man and his lifestyle really intrigues me. I had heard the rumors, but thanks to this excellent memoir by Jillian Lauren I started to really roam the Internet. Prince Jefri is the youngest brother of the sultan of Brunei. He is - or in fact, was - known for his extravag...
I thought this was going to be about Brunei. I thought this was going to be about life in a harem. I thought this was going to be about a woman's descriptions and feelings about harem life. It was none of this. Some Girls is a pathetic attempt at storytelling about a woman's boring childhood, family, and sex escapades.First of all, the word "harem" is used in a very modern sense, and not in the traditional or Islamic sense which means the place where the women of the household live their lives.
I didn't love this book. I thought it was a waste of time. The language was awful, and I didn't understand many parts. She skips around and brings in analogies that don't make a lot of sense. Lots of reviews talk about how she "found" herself and grew up. I didn't get that at all. Seemed to me like she didn't learn anything from her mistakes. It skips 14 years ahead and gives one page on her life now with her husband and baby. Somewhere in that 14 years she may have learned, but if so, she skipp...
If you've been a real, live, contemporary harem girl, and you can write worth a damn, then clearly you have a story to tell. Jillian Lauren certainly can write worth a damn, which makes for an entertaining and rather sickening glance into a mental landscape that is frequently unflattering, vacillating wildly between a preciously narcissistic self-concept and good ol' low self-esteem. In Lauren's world, other women are a series of assets and liabilities to be assessed as "the competition". It's e...
I heard the author give an interview on Howard Stern about this book, and was intrigued not so much by her harem/hooker past but by the fact she is now married to the bassist of Weezer, and they adopted a little boy from Ethiopia... just like me (the Ethiopia part, not the Weezer part). And okay, the harem thing was sort of interesting. But though this book was readable, by the end I was totally annoyed by the writer. She has the pretense of being this fantastic author who honed her craft during...
I picked this book up after reading about it in the paper. I was unaware that it was a memoir type story. I figured it was fiction. My bad. The writer appears to be bi polar as far as her story is concerned. On one hand she glamorizes being a hooker, on the other she tries to show she regrets her choices, wants to be a better person...but keeps going right back to all the perks of being a prostitute. She waxes poetic a lot, it's all BS, like a creative writing assignment gone bad. Some of the ev...
Some Girls is about, on the surface, Lauren's time spent in a harem in Brunei, but dig just marginally beneath that surface and you will see that this is a memoir that tackles major moments in both her life and one's that many women struggle with. Lauren leaves home at 16 to head out on her own at NYU, but soon finds the life of the theater and, later, escorting, more her style. She is young, brash and carefree, but Lauren never makes it as easy as "I was rebelling." She transposes her freewheel...
I liked this a lot more than I thought I would. I've often found there is a relationship between the quality of the writing in a memoir and the outlandishness of the story - The crazier the life story, the crappier the writing, and vice versa. So I figured that it doesn't really get much more bizarre than spending several months as part of a harem for the sons of the Sultan of Brunei, and that the writing would be horrible.Well, it wasn't. I thought it was actually really good. I tore through it...
I saw this author on The View promoting this book. I immediately thought 2 things: 1) I am about to rewrite a story that is set in a modern-day harem and this would be good for research and 2) here is another person who got a publishing contract not because she can write, but because she happened to have a good story which in light of the recent Oprah book club memoir debacles may or may not be true. Amid the depressing thoughts that I would perhaps have to join a harem to get a NY publishing co...
This was a pleasant surprise. The subtitle gave me pause for a moment, but this memoir was not the tawdry, cheesy and/or poorly written mess I feared it might be. Why was I reading this at all? A $1 find at the library and a mood to indulge in a light, easy-breezy summertime read. It was that, but more, a coming-of-age story about the author’s search for identity at ages 18 and 19 in an unusual setting with a twist, and finally, her learning how to have compassion for her own mistakes and shortc...
I admit that I gave this memoir five stars instead of four because I know the author, though only distantly. I admired her writing early in her career and when I finally read this memoir I was pretty blown away. I hear a lot of hating in the comments, but that doesn't really make sense to me. It's really quite a beautifully-written book. Maybe memoir is just one of those things that either clicks with you or doesn't. But I've read a lot of books about sex work, and this one was unquestionably on...
(2.5 stars) This is a very quick, interesting read. The author is looking back at her 18-19 year old self who dropped out of NYU, became a stripper, became an escort, and ended up as a member of the Prince of Brunei's harem (this is all on the book jacket, so it's not a spoiler). While I really enjoyed some of the passages (the scenes where she spends spends spends in Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, etc. are crazy), there are a lot of long boring flashbacks to her upper-middle class Jewish upbringing i...
Finished this yesterday. One word comes to mind about this book. That word is... Honest!Wow That girl is so honest, In was sometimes shocked but loved it as well.How she spoke about her father. That was the first thing that surprised me.Quote: "In Great tradition of Jewish parents, his dearest belief is that when he is dead, I'll spend the rest of my life regretting my callous behaviour towards him" Wow. I do not find that a very positive thing about Jewish parents if that is true.She also wrote...
It's hard to feel sorry for a woman who prostituted herself to the richest man in the world, and was allowed to fly to Singapore and spend more than "the down payment on her house" on designer clothes. Sure, she was bored, and manipulated, and pulled into the catty machinations of the harem, but in the end she walked away with ten of thousands of dollars in cash, and jewelry. It was a fascinating story, and the author's background/upbringing explains a good deal of dissociative relationship with...