Jillian Lauren; First to Storm
It’s been three years since I graduated with my MFA from Antioch LA, three years since our class huddled together on the hotel grass, sweating through our graduation robes and smiling for a photo. I remember looking around me at all the immensely talented poets and storytellers and thinking, “We’re going to take the world by storm.”
One of us has. Jillian Lauren ‘s memoir Some Girls: My Life in a Harem is a New York Times Bestseller. Booyah!
Any peer’s success stirs up a mix of happiness, hope and jealousy. When I heard about the book my first thought was, “If only I’d been in a harem in Brunei at eighteen, I’d have written a bestseller too.”
But after a few lines into the book, I realized that this wasn’t a cashing in on a unique experience. Some Girls is no literary peepshow; it is a personal story equally relatable and atypical, brimming with hard honesty and poignant reflection. Jillian’s prose is so robust, so sparkling with life that even if the subject matter were more mundane (My Life in a Twinkie Factory) it would still grip the reader’s attention. Jillian seamlessly transitions between past and present throughout the book. It is clear that this is a writer telling her story, not a person with a story trying to write.
During her recent book tour, she appeared on The View. Watching the episode, I couldn’t help but flinch every time Barbara Walters hissed the word ‘hooker’ at Jillian. I asked Jillian if she thought Barbara had been harsh to her. She told me that Barbara read the whole book and really liked it. Backstage after the show, Barbara touched Jillian’s hand and said, “This is going to sell you a lot of books.”
In May, I caught up with her at a reading at Kaboom Books in Houston, the last stop of her tour. When she finished reading her second passage, she said smiling, “That’s enough, right?” A few people groaned, asking for more. Lightning crackled in the distance as Jillian answered questions from the audience. A man asked her what she would say to a woman faced with a similar opportunity to the one she detailed in her memoir.
“I know women who go into it (sex work) from a place of joy and love and they’re fine.” She said, “But those girls are one in a million. It’s not like that for most girls.” Pausing to collect her thoughts, she added, “I would tell her not to go into it lightly.”
The book signing line stayed long throughout the night. People gushed about Some Girls and asked Jillian to sign copies for their sister-in-law, their neighbor or their teenage daughter.
She talked of the support and response she’d received so far saying, “I get emails from all kinds of people. One woman said, ‘I have three autistic kids and I’m just so busy all the time and your book was such a great escape.’ And one woman was an escort and she’d never told anyone and she says that the book was so inspiring and that I was brave to write it.”
As she signed my copy I asked her if she had gotten tired of signing her name.
“I never get tired of this,” she said emphatically, “I can’t even believe it exists.”
She described all the attention, the TV appearances, the success as “overwhelming.” But fresh from a dusty drive from Austin and numerous stops up and down the coasts she didn’t seem worn out at all. Discussing her process in writing the book with newly acquired fans, she glowed.
I didn’t know Jillian all that well in grad school. She was the hot tattooed girl that had once smiled at my Weezer sweatshirt and said, “You like them? That’s my husband’s band.” But like more and more people, I’ve come to know Jillian through the story she’s thankfully decided to share. Some Girls is about finding your way, about fighting off the self-hating side of yourself and accepting your past.
The other day I looked at the photo again of us in our robes. Jillian stands in the middle, her face obscured by a graduation cap. Did she know that she’d come this far in a few short years? A highly successful memoir, a novel coming out next year, did she envision this? I scanned the squinting faces and wondered, “Who’s next?”
SHELFLIFEMAGAZINE : issue #010 |