Like watching a dysfunctional guest on reality tv

"My job description was elusive at best, but I fantasized that I might arrive and find a wild adventure, a pile of money, and an employer who was no less than Prince Charming. This was my opportunity to shake of my bohemian mantle and re-imagine myself as an enigmatic export, maybe a royal mistress or the heroine of a spy novel. More realistically, I suspected I had signed on to be an international quasi-prostitute. There are worse things I could do."

Picked this up in a sale because it sounded interesting. It's the true memoir of Jillian, an 18 year old in the early '90s who decides to accept an offer to fly to Brunei and join a group of other beautiful women gracing the parties of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, youngest brother of the Sultan of Brunei. For a period of just a couple weeks she's promised $20,000, but ends up staying longer and walking away with several hundred thousand dollars and a story she's turned into this autobiography.

It's a pretty fast read, nothing too deep here, but an interesting inside view of the life of the girls in the 'harem' of Prince Jefri. The dynamics of his inner circle, the ridiculous waste of wealth and corruption of power, and the lack of real friendship, support, or happiness anywhere at all - not among the girls, not among the prince and his friends, and certainly not between the prince and the girls at any time. He uses them as display objects, for example having them lie around the pool in bikinis just so he can have important visitors to meetings overlooking the pool.

The latter part of the book is more about Jillian's life and family; her abusive adoptive father and passively helpless mother go a long way to explain why she seems pretty dysfunctional and keeps making terrible decisions like dropping out of university to become a stripper. But was it a terrible decision to fly to Brunei and make a few hundred dollars for a few months' work and fairly occasional sex with the prince of Brunei? The book will make you think a bit about that; given what her other options at the time were, it's certainly not the worst decision she made, anyway.

Reading this book was a bit like watching a reality tv show where the guest is so awfully dysfunctional that it's hard to look away. But it also paints an interesting picture of the time and place, and a lifestyle almost all of us could only begin to imagine.

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