Jillian Lauren’s Life in a Harem is Stranger Than Fiction

Eagle Rock resident Jillian Lauren was an 18-year-old NYU theater school dropout when someone told her that a rich businessman in Singapore was paying pretty American girls $20,000 for a two-week stint to spice up his parties. Gullible and hard up, Lauren jumped at the offer—and found herself on the island of Borneo, where she spent the next 18 months in the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, the youngest brother of the Sultan of Brunei, one of the world’s richest men.

Lauren told the riveting story of her experience as one of Prince Jefri’s many keeps in “Some Girls: My Life in a Harem,” her 2010 memoir that was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 14 languages. The author Jennifer Egan praised the book not just for bringing to life the “murky world of high-class prostitution for the general reader” but for revealing “how and why a middle-class kid like Lauren found herself in such a line of work—and how she got out."

On Friday, the Barnes & Noble Book Blog named "Some Girls" in an article titled “7 Books You Won’t Believe Are Nonfiction.” Lauren’s memoir is second on the list—next only to "The Legend of Grizzly Adams: California’s Greastest Man," the story of a man who tamed a wild bear, taught it to carry things, and wrestled with the beast on road shows.

Click here to read Barnes & Noble’s Stranger Than Fiction blog.

And click here to read about Some Girls as well as get a glimpse of Jillian’s harem life in a video.