Jillian Lauren - Some Girls: My Life in a Harem
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- Book:Some Girls: My Life in a Harem
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- Year:2010
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Some Girls: My Life in a Harem: summary, description and annotation
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A jaw-dropping story of how a girl from the suburbs ends up in a princes hare, and emerges from the secret Xanadu both richer and wiser. At eighteen, Jillian Lauren was an NYU theater school dropout with a tip about an upcoming audition. The casting director told her that a rich businessman in Singapore would pay pretty American girls $20,000 if they stayed for two weeks to spice up his parties. Soon, Jillian was on a plane to Borneo, where she would spend the next eighteen months in the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, youngest brother of the Sultan of Brunei, leaving behind her gritty East Village apartment for a palace with rugs laced with gold and trading her band of artist friends for a coterie of backstabbing beauties. More than just a sexy read set in an exotic land, Some Girls is also the story of how a rebellious teen found herself-and the courage to meet her birth mother and eventually adopt a baby boy.
Jillian Lauren: author's other books
Who wrote Some Girls: My Life in a Harem? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Jillian Lauren
Jillian Lauren
Jillian Lauren
Halle Butler
Fran Lee
Jillian Bullock
Jillian Lauren
Nicole Kornher-Stace
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Jillian Lauren
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acknowledgments
Special thanks to Becky Cole, Alexandra Machinist, Patti Smith, Jim Krusoe, Leonard Chang, Joe Gratziano, Anne Dailey, Colin Summers, Nell Scovell, Claire LaZebnik, the Writers Sunget, Robert Morgan Fisher, Tammy Stoner, Ivan Sokolov, Suzanne Luke, Carol Allen, Catharine Dill, Amber Lasciak, R. P. Brink, the Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, Lindsay Davis, Sean Eden, Dr. Keely Kolmes, Julie Fogliano, Jennifer Erdagon, Jerry Stahl, Shawna Kenney, Bett Williams, Austin Young, Lily Burana, Lynnee Breedlove, Gabrielle Samuels, Sherri Carpenter, and, always, Scott Shriner.
Deepest gratitude to my family and to all who shared my story.
chapter 1
The day I left for Brunei I took the subway uptown to Beth Israel, schlepping behind me a green flowered suitcase. The last time I had used the suitcase was when I left my room in NYUs Hayden Hall for good, dragged all my crap out of the elevator and onto the sidewalk, and cabbed it down to the Lower East Side, where a friend of a friend had a room for rent. The time before that, my mother had helped me unpack from it my college-y fall clothes, labeled jammies, and ziplock bags full of homemade chocolate-chip cookies. Each time I unzipped that suitcase it contained a whole different set of carefully folded plans. Each time I packed it back up I was on the run again.
I heaved the suitcase up three steps, rested, then heaved again until the rectangle of light at the top of the staircase opened out onto the bright buzz of Fourteenth Street. Underneath my winter overcoat the back of my shirt was damp with sweat. I hadnt thought Id packed so much. Id stood in front of my closet for hours wishing the perfect dress would magically materialize in a flurry of sparkles, would soar through the door, held aloft by a host of bluebirds. I was going to a royal ball, goddammit. I was traveling to meet a prince. Was my fairy godmother really going to leave me with such a lousy selection of clothes to choose from? Apparently she was.
In the end, Id settled for packing two tailored skirt suits, three fifties prom dresses, an armful of vintage underwear-cum-outerwear, two hippie sundresses, a pair of leather hot pants, and some glittery leg warmers. All those not-quite-right clothes weighed too much. Or maybe it was the anvil of guilt I was carrying around for the act of desertion I was about to commit by abandoning my sick father in favor of an adventure in a foreign country. Either way, Id yet to learn how to pack light. I pointed myself toward the hospital, merged into the stream of pedestrian traffic, and allowed the collective sense of purpose to pull me along.
My father was being operated on for a paraesophageal hiatal hernia, a condition in which part of the stomach squeezes through an opening in the diaphragm called the hiatus, landing it next to the esophagus. The danger is that the stomach can be strangled, cut off from its blood supply. Hiatal hernias occur most often in overweight people and people with extreme stress levels, both of which apply in my fathers case. In 1991, the surgery for a hiatal hernia was dangerous and invasive, requiring a major incision that would travel from his sternum around to his back. I had originally told my mother I would be there to help out in any way that I could, but when the Brunei job came around, I changed my mind.
This compulsion of mine to be forever on the move may have been a genetic inevitability. My birth mother named me Mariah, after the song They Call the Wind Mariah, from the Broadway musical Paint Your Wagon. Maybe she knew Id soon sail away from her in the airborne cradle of a 747. The name didnt stick. My adoptive mother renamed me Jill Lauren after nothing at all; she just liked it. An amateur thespian herself, she thought Lauren could serve as a stage name if I ever needed one, and so it has.
I may have been named for the wind, but I am a triple fire sign, a child of heat and sun. I was born mid-August 1973 in Highland Park, Illinois. Roe v. Wade was decided on January 22, 1973, which would have placed my biological mother at nearly three months pregnant, still swaddled under the layers of down that insulated her from the Chicago winter. I dont know if she considered an abortion as her slim dancers body morphed into something cumbersome and out of control, as her flighty boyfriend took their car and headed east one day and never came home again, as the wind off the water turned the slushy streets to sheets of ice and bit at any inch of exposed skin, made more raw and vulnerable with the pregnancy.
Seven hundred miles away, in the not-so-posh apartments across from Saint Barnabas Hospital in West Orange, New Jersey, a young stockbroker and his wife despaired of their childless state. It was a time rife with shady adoptions, sealed files, and what my father has referred to as gray-market transactions. My parents contacted a lawyer who knew of someone who knew of someone who knew of a pregnant girl in Chicago looking to give her baby up for adoption. That lawyer was later disbarred and imprisoned for his role in many such adoptions because youre not supposed to arrange for babies to be bought and sold.
Gray-market babies didnt come cheap. My parents were not yet wealthy, but they were desperate for a family. They ate inexpensive food and wore old shoes and waited. They waited as the neighbors filled their plastic kiddie pools. They waited while my mother graciously attended baby shower after baby shower, tossing the little candy-filled baby-bottle favors into the trash on her way home. My parents waited and avoided the subject, talking instead about the stock market, tennis, the neighbors, until the lawyer finally called them and told them to get on a plane because their daughter had been born. My mother was a social worker at the time and she swears that she was at home to hear the phone because she had called in sick that day with an unexplained stomachache, psychic labor pains.
We lived together in that crowded one-bedroom for two years, until my fathers stockbroking business picked up and my parents were able to buy a house in a neighboring town with a desirable zip code and good public schools. I grew up in the kind of town in which orthodonture was mandatory and getting a nose job as a gift for your sweet sixteen was highly recommended.
Those very early years were a love affair of sorts between my father and me. My father was a man who was most pleased by good looks and accomplishments, so I worked at being precociously bright, athletic, musicalanything to impress him. And whenever I wasnt, I cheated or I faked it. My father was wild about his little sidekick and to me, he was the king of the world. I waited each day at the top of the steps to hear the rumble of the garage door so I could run to greet him when he emerged, so important in his shiny shoes and Brooks Brothers suits.
My parents told me only one thing about my birth mother. They told me that she was a ballerina. In my fantasy, my birth mother was a life-size version of the tiny dancer twirling inside my satin-lined music box. My plastic ballerina had the smallest brushstroke of red hair and limbs the width of toothpicks. She never lost her balance; she never had to let her arms down. I imagined my birth mother posed in a perpetual arabesque, swathed in white tulle, with a tiara of sparkling snowflakes in her hair.
I would wind the key tightly and the opening notes of Swan Lake would chime double time at first, then more slowly, until they would plink to a stop. But somewhere in between, the little plastic figurine would turn at just the right speed. That was when I would raise my arms in the air and twirl along with her. Somewhere between too fast and too slow, we would be in perfect sync.
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