Jillian Lauren, author of the memoir Some Girls: My Life in A Harem, signs books with a flourish: “Some girls kiss and tell!” She is a gorgeous brunette with a wide smile and short fingernails. She is also a former stripper, New York call girl, art school student, actress, and member of a select crew of party guests auditioned and hired to “entertain” the Sultan of Brunei's younger brother, Prince Jefri. It was the early 1990s, and Lauren was inexplicably told to call Prince Jefri “Robin” when she arrived at the lavishly constructed party-land where she would pass her nineteenth year. With careful emotional hindsight and an impeccable weaving of detail, Lauren reveals two worlds now extinct: the tightly-controlled, early years of American girls' involvement in Robin's harem, and her own irretrievable, passionately floundering late teens. Lauren's memoir moves through New York City, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and the Borneo palace, where she lived at the whim of the Prince, with an ineffable grace. She calls herself clumsy, but her story dances across gold-thread rugs and peeling hardwood with equal aplomb. While she describes a few years of utter creative chaos, sexual dissociation, and intense attached/avoidant love affairs, Lauren deftly avoids blaming her vicissitudes on her work as a prostitute or harem girl. She is neither dispassionate nor defensive. She is fascinated, still, by the systems that produce men who can't get enough sex or cars, women who can't get enough attention or power, and this fascination gives her writing the touch of a lover, not the smack of a polemic. During her first week in Brunei, Lauren writes, “A painting caught my eye that every other night I had passed right by … I had studied this kind of painting in art history, had analyzed each racist, imperialist brushstroke. And here was a romanticized, nineteenth-century Western portrayal of a harem hanging one hundred and fifty years later on the wall of–a harem. It was positively postmodern.” Lauren's painful loneliness as a young woman living in the competitive world of Robin's unending girl-parade is made palpable as she discusses her eating disorder, her boredom, her desperate attempts to stay in New York in between stints in Brunei. She also makes no bones about her attraction to Robin, her attraction to the money, her attraction to the adventure and the stamp of “difference” she'd spent her New Jersey childhood cultivating. Eventually she makes that stamp literal, in the form of an elaborate tattoo that curls from her stomach to her vulva. Lauren spends much of the book asking herself “What would Patti Smith do?” but admits that there were moments during which she felt much more like Patty Hearst, wanting desperately for Robin or other women in the harem to approve of her. The details of her time in Brunei are personal, at times stifling, in keeping with the fact that she was often kept in locked rooms, opulent as they were, and was not privy to any official information about the Prince, the country, or even what she was expected to do, until she was expected to do it. However, Some Girls is not a cautionary tale about sex work. While Lauren does not ignore the thorny questions of agency and servitude in the international sex industry, Some Girls is less an exposé and more an elegant reflection on the dangers of losing oneself, to whatever might consume us. Lauren knows one must begin from a position of basic privilege to ask the questions she is asking, even as she reveals familial abuse and her own depression. She admits to blank spots in her narrative: she was often drunk, she was sexually dissociated, she doesn't remember it all. She didn't go to Brunei to write this book. She struggles to explain why she went at all. In the hands of a less reflective writer, her moments of fuzzy recollection or confused motives would seem dishonest. But for Lauren, these confusions are actually the moments of “reality” in a surreal world. Emotion and memory are tangled, slippery, and unreliable. Flashes of emotional clarity are a luxury, and by the end of Lauren's narrative, it is obvious that the luxury of a Tiffany diamond jewelry set pales in comparison. BM
