(View entire post here)

My time as one of Prince Jefri's many girlfriends can't be summed up in a single adjective. In many ways, I wrote the book in an attempt to convey the complexity of the experience. The truth is, in some ways I did get the wild adventure I was after. I was transported from being an insecure Jersey teenager to an international royal mistress, lounging every night in a room where the carpet was woven through with gold. But in exchange for a moment of surreal luxury, I lost the ability to see myself clearly, to know what I truly wanted. My moral compass got thrown way out of whack.

In spite of the darker aspects of the story (and there are many), I did get a gift from my experience that has lasted far longer than the Bulgari necklace sets, long ago sold to an estate jeweler somewhere in New York's diamond district. It was during the long, dull afternoons of the monsoon season in Brunei that I began to write in earnest while rain pounded the skylight over my head. I wrote page after page of journal entries about what I saw, what I smelled, what people said, what I made of it all. Those pages were an invaluable resource to me when it came time to write my book years later. But more than that, the act of writing itself has given me the ability to fit my observations, both extraordinary and mundane, into a frame of my own design.

The gift of this realization came full circle this weekend when I had my first signing, at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books (see picture to the right). I've attended the festival for years and it was truly an honor to finally find myself on the other side of the signing table. As I watched my book vanish into the crowd in the hands of strangers, I realized that it's not my book at all anymore. It's your book now. The gift of writing that I discovered in Brunei — I'm finally able to give it away.

 (View entire post here)

Updated: Read an interview with Jillian Lauren

The Westin Stamford Singapore is the tallest hotel in the world, a cylinder rising seventy-three floors above the harbor. It was a far stretch from the tenement apartment on New York's Lower East Side that I had left behind. I arrived after three days of travel, ordered satay from room service and immediately passed out with the lights still on. When I opened my eyes eight hours later, jetlagged and wide awake, it was just before dawn. I got out of bed hugging my own naked ribs and pulled the heavy drapes to reveal a navy sky shifting to cobalt. I walked out into the warm, soft air and watched the fishing skiffs glide out of the harbor. I was alone, exactly halfway around the world from where I had started and I had an ocean of unknown possibilities in front of me. I was paused at the brink of a great adventure, in which I would live in a palace and entertain a Prince and perhaps my life would be changed in dazzling and unexpected ways.

I was sure that this was how I had been waiting to feel, ever since as a little girl I danced though my parents' dinner parties wearing a feather boa and a bowler hat and singing "Mein Herr" from Cabaret. The heroine of Cabaret, Sally Bowles, said it best when describing herself as, "strange and extraordinary." That was I — strange and extraordinary. Surely an equally strange and extraordinary life lay ahead of me. I must have been so enchanted by that turn of phrase that I missed the rest of the movie, during which Sally's reckless choices force a deep distinction between her fantasy life and her reality. In her fantasies, she is a star on the rise. In her reality, she is stuck in a seedy and decadent prison of her own design.

(View entire post here)

Jillian Lauren is one of our guest bloggers during the week of April 26th. If you have any questions for her, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some more information about Some Girls: My Life In a Harem.

A jaw-dropping story of how a girl from the suburbs ends up in a prince's harem, 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.