Jillian Lauren On Her New Book, Adoption & Touring With Weezer
EntertainmentPerhaps Margaret Cho said it best when she called Jillian Lauren a “punk rock Scheherazade.” Lauren hit the literary scene in 2010 with the publication of Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, her New York Times bestselling-memoir and, like the legendary Scheherazade, Lauren seems to save her own life by telling fascinating stories. But unlike the new wife of the Persian king, the adventures that Lauren recounts are her own.
Some Girls tells the tale of how Lauren’s acting ambitions turned to stripping, high class sex work and ultimately membership in the harem of bad boy Prince Jefri Bolkiah of Brunei. In “Some Girls,” Lauren writes honestly and intriguingly about the interweaving of her insecurities and ambitions, and the pain inherent in rescuing herself from the harem life with its lazy days, dizzyingly exorbitant shopping sprees, and harem party nights full of backstabbing, jealousy, heartbreak and shifting alliances.
By the beginning of her second memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted (Plume, May 5, 2015), the landscape of Lauren’s life has changed dramatically. She picks up a few years after Some Girls ends, when she meets and marries Weezer bassist Scott Shriner and together they try to start a family. Lauren was adopted as an infant and hopes that by having children she’ll feel more connected to the world. But her happy vision of redeeming herself from her wild child past through motherhood soon turns to pain as she finds herself unable to have a baby.
Everything you Ever Wanted details Lauren and Shriner’s decision to adopt a baby from Ethiopia, their journey to meet the baby and his birth mother, and the unexpected struggles they encounter as a new family once they return home to Los Angeles with their 11-month-old son Tariku. Lauren writes passionately about the difficulties–and rich rewards–of learning to parent her son, who has special needs resulting from trauma experienced in the first months of his life. In Everything, Lauren grapples with feeling worthy of motherhood and of the fairy tale life in which she finds herself. Ultimately, Lauren finds that redemption is all the more rewarding with its attendant challenges.
I spoke with Lauren about Everything You Every Wanted and about adopting and raising her son Tariku.
In some ways, your life sounds like a fairytale. After earlier struggles, you and Weezer bassist Scott Shriner fell in love and you were able to live this very idyllic seeming life—getting an MFA and touring with Weezer. And yet, you were still very stricken with sadness because you weren’t able to have a child. Can you talk a little bit about that paradox?
I had very specific expectations around what I thought settling down and having a family was going to look like. And granted our version of that is more arty and bohemian than some. But even so, I thought, “Okay. I’m behaving now. I’m a good girl. I’ve joined the fold.” So there’s reward for that, right? And the reward is the white picket fence and the 2.5 children. That wasn’t what happened to us at all. What I found was that we encountered a tremendous amount of adversity and pain–and that wasn’t the entirety of the story–but that became a very big piece of it when the family we wanted so badly wasn’t happening. But now I would go through every minute of it again, because it was that adversity that shaped me as a person and prepared us for what it was like when we encountered challenges in our early years of parenting.
It’s great to hear you say that adversity can end up being a blessing. So once you decided to adopt, you traveled to Ethiopia to meet your son, and you also met his birth mother and learned about her struggles. She told you about how she was raised picking cotton and fetching water and that her family was very poor and often without enough food. How did meeting her and seeing firsthand the extreme difficulties that she’d faced in her own life affect you?
Meeting my son’s birth mother was probably the most significant moment of our life..It changed us in so many ways. It deepened my respect for the enormous bravery and sacrifice it takes to make an adoption plan for a child you’re unable to care for, for whatever reason.