About book Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside The Playboy Mansion (2006)
Despite the title, most of this book is about the author's relationship with her father and doesn't even occur in the mansion. But Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside My Father's Malibu Home wouldn't sell as many books.The author's father was Hugh Hefner's personal physician and best friend for decades. When her parents divorced she began spending time at the Playboy Mansion to see her father and eventually moved to her father's house, going to the mansion after school. Playground attempts to analyze the damage her father's attitude towards parenting--and her parents' way of using her as a weapon against one another--has done in her life. The promised titillation is there: pre-teen drugs, wild parties, celebrities in compromising or embarrassing positions, teenage love affair with Hefner's girlfriend, mob hit-men, South American drug runners, and a parade of fashion and music that covers twenty-plus years of L.A. excess. But the book isn't as lurid as the cover copy suggests. Saginor uses the outrageous episodes to plot how she changed from angry at one parent to angry at another, from excited to scared, and from enthused to numb. The story goes from tabloid to insight when Jennifer begins to drift off the trajectory her father is following. She implies that her father was getting more extreme (and in one part--while using injected drugs--he almost certainly was), but this coincides with Jennifer's late teens and we can also see her own maturation in the way she recognizes how out-of-touch her father is with the notion of consequences. We've seen this sort of book before, of course, whether in celebrity tell-alls or Brett Easton Ellis-alike fiction. Saginor's version is interesting for the contrasts she provides. We see her life in the contexts of upper-class families, high school, her serious-minded and loving grandfather, her father's wild friends and their manipulative and dangerous world, and at the mansion, where fun is free-flowing and consequences are handled by each person individually as best they can.The mansion serves as a neutral ground for putting her life with her family into relief. She has friends there (some celebrities, playmates, and staff); she can retreat there to reflect; and no one (at least, no one mentioned in the book) pressures or threatens her there. Towards the end, she comments that Hugh Hefner is the one person who allowed her to be a child. Using the mansion this way is effective, especially as her father's household gets more out of touch with reality and the mansion seems like a safe refuge for normalcy.The writing is passable, although there are a number of sudden jumps in tone or place that made me re-read sections to follow them. I'm not fond of the present tense artifice, but it isn't too bad here. What Saginor does very, very well, though, is to ground the story in a sense of time. People wear clothes that evoke a particular moment in the 80's, they listen to music in one chapter that will be gone in the next, and the fashion designers and labels, as well as the movie or star who popularized a particular look, will revivify the moment for anyone who was alive and in America at the time.This is a really quick read and it's worth it if you're interested in the genre.
This book reminded me of Adele Mailer’s “The Last Party” in that both authors were scathing in their contempt of the women that hung around on the periphery of their lives. Saginor labels the woman in her social circle, stupid whores and sluts. By the end, I was ashamed that I had read this trash. I was hoping Sagninor would have gained some wisdom, perhaps provide insight, and reveal that she’d gained some peace or healing via therapy. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen. She absolves Hugh Hefner of any and all responsibility. He was the only one who never hurt her, she writes. But that ignores the fact that he’s the one who put this toxic female gladiator system in place and maintains it. He shows no concern for any of the women’s mental health or well-being. If Sagnior is to be believed, at least one woman overdosed and had her body “disappeared.”Clearly Saginor loved being a part of the Playboy party life and she still took part in it up to the point where she was writing the book. As other reviewers have noted she obsessively mentions the labels she was wearing, the brand of alcohol she drank, the high-class restaurants she ate at, and the songs that she was listening to—not only the songs, but at least twice she mentions the radio station that was playing them. That’s incredible recall for a girl who was drunk or high most of the time and it strains her credibility. It also shows how out of touch she is with reality because who really cares what kind of designer bag it was that she threw her clothes into when she was (temporarily)fleeing her abusive father.Saginor writes about how she cheated her way through high school and then through college—so no redemption for her there. The book jacket reports that she “has worked” for Spelling Entertainment etc. “Has worked,” implies that she’s currently unemployed. And I have no doubt that every last one of these jobs was arranged for her. The main failing of this memoir for me was that Saginor never stopped taking her father’s money. She never stood on her own two feet, went without the decadence, and tried to make something of her life. She was, and it seems remains (judging by a post on her website that are full of vitriolic bitterness directed at someone that would dare question the validity of her story) a selfish, shallow, annoying, waste of humanity.
Do You like book Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside The Playboy Mansion (2006)?
I read for our book club. It's our "trashy summer beach read." I'm happy I'm done with it. It's just a lot of name-dropping and whining. At first I thought that she had learned something from her analysis of her dad's behavior, but no...she acknowledged several times throughout the book that, like her father, she uses people and is generally misogynistic, but at the end of the book she is still calling everyone sluts and whores and being generally evil to other people around her. So I guess the book is just her way of feeling sorry for herself because of the mess her life was and blaming it on her parents.I should also add that there are numerous sentences with antecedent-referent issues, or subject-verb agreement issues. It's too bad she did not hire a ghostwriter.
—Heather
You know how sometimes you're at a party and someone starts to tell you some personal story and at first it's interesting and the pretty quickly it starts to seem a little fantastic and then by the end you're pretty sure a bunch of it is an outright made up lie? Well this book felt a lot like that. The writing is AWFUL. I mean, really, really bad. I promise you I am a better writer than Jennifer Saginor. After I finished reading (quick read, took less than 1 day) I had to fact check some of her story since it's suppose to be true. Although one character sued her for libel, that lawsuit doesn't appear to have gained much traction. Hugh Hefner basically only corrected two little things on a time line and everything I could determine indicates the story was actually toned down for publication and the publisher requested sworn testimony from some people involved before their legal dept. would allow publishing. So maybe all this crap really did happen and it only seems like a lie because it's so extreme. At any rate the writing is still deplorable. It's hard to put down because the story is so crazy, but there's not much to redeem it from it's terrible construction.
—Lezlee Hays
Um, it's just really bad. I was seduced by a jacket design that I feel is far too good for the contents. The book reads like a Gossip Girl book written by apes; every time Saginor enters a room or introduces someone new (which is usually by just naming them and then 12 pages later mentioning that they're a Playmate or a classmate or her mom or whatever), she names the labels that everyone is wearing. She's also constantly mentioning what song is on the radio, to the point that you question the v
—Sarah Kathleen
