Book #19: Some Girls: My Life in a Harem by Jillian Lauren

I'll say this up front: I would imagine most people would be significantly uncomfortable reading this book. I would definitely not recommend it to anyone who has any qualms about reading things with sexual content--not that this book was overly explicit, but it is about an eighteen-year-old girl who literally is in a harem with the Prince of Brunei and worked as a sex worker before going there. There were definitely parts that made me uncomfortable, but since I was listening to this on an audiobook, I would just skip 3-4 minutes ahead and not have to hear anything else from that section or situation. (It worked so much better than skipping bad stuff while reading. It was great!) I came to this book after reading Lauren's Everything You Ever Wanted, in which she talks about her adoption process with her little boy, which happens at the same time that she was writing this original memoir about her experiences in Brunei. After listening to that book and how she wrote about it and what the fallout was from it (obviously, when you write about being a sex worker, there is going to be fallout in your personal life), I was interested to read this one. And also, I LOVED the other memoir. Lauren's voice in that one was so raw and honest and real that I felt like I knew and loved her and wanted to hear more about her. This one wasn't quite as good as the other one--but maybe that was because of the subject matter and how much more emotional and compelling the story of motherhood is to me.

Anyways, in THIS book, Lauren writes about her experiences going to "work" in Brunei, basically as a part of the prince of Brunei's harem of women he kept around to sleep with. She had already been working as a stripper and as a call girl before going there, so it wasn't too shocking to her to be doing those things. She writes about the infighting and difficulty the women had with each other, and the relationship that Prince Jefri had with the women and how he treated them, and what rewards they got from their time there (she ended up with hundreds of thousands of dollars). She also has a lot of flashbacks to her younger life with her family, and why she basically ran away from home and how she ended up doing what she did. I thought her family relationships were especially interesting, especially since I'd already listened to her other book and found out how they'd reacted when this first memoir came out (her parents disowned her and stopped communicating with her altogether after she wrote this book). She wrote about her father was sometimes abusive (verbally and physically) and why she ran away to college at age 16 before dropping out.

I just couldn't help reading this book thinking how sad Lauren's whole story was. She was so young--only eighteen! And she had been doing stuff like this for a few years already. It is just amazing to consider the difference between me and her and what we were doing at those respective ages. At age 18, I was living the life of a very naive and unaware BYU freshman, who still hadn't ever even kissed anyone. I felt so sad for her and thought how it was like a cautionary tale for parents to not act like her parents had. Once she became a teenager and started acting out, they grew super frustrated with her and pushed her away, and look what happened to her. She later became a serious drug addict (she references it in her second memoir) and eventually puts her life back together, but it took decades. I know she didn't write it to be a cautionary tale (she kind of references that at the beginning of the book) but I couldn't help reading it like that. Obviously I wouldn't want a child working as a sex worker, but more than that, her obviously very conflicted relationship with her parents and her terrible self-esteem as a young woman are truly damaging pitfalls that all parents want to think they're helping their child to avoid.

All in all, I didn't love this book like I did her other one, but it was interesting enough since I'd already learned a lot about her in the other book. I may not have cared too much about finishing this one if I hadn't already connected with her in her other memoir. Overall, I was glad when this ended with a minimum of damage done to her and when she put this whole experience behind her.