Rating
4/5 stars
Intro
If you’ve ever wondered what life was like inside of the Playboy Mansion or what was actually going on behind the scenes of Girls Next Door, this book is for you.
When I was in high school I used to watch Holly Madison on the E! show Girls Next Door. The show followed Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilson living their lives at the Playboy Mansion. They were, of course, Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends. Holly was the main girlfriend.
I had totally forgotten all about this show until I randomly came across a podcast episode of Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown featuring Holly Madison. Holly was a keenly interesting and entertaining guest, talking about her life at the Playboy mansion and also sharing about getting diagnosed late with autism. The latter was what initially piqued my interest and actually helped me realize that I’m autistic myself (my world blew wide open with that revelation but I’ll get into that another time).
I immediately looked for other podcasts featuring Holly and after listening to her on Baby, This is Keke Palmer and Talk Tuah with Haliey Welch, I learned she had written a couple of books about her life: Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny and The Vegas Diaries: Romance, Rolling the Dice, and the Road to Reinvention – A Memoir of Burlesque and Hollywood Glamour.
I downloaded Down the Rabbit Hole on Kindle and devoured it over the course of a one-week work trip. I read most of it on the plane.
About the book
(*Trigger warning*) The book opens with Holly at a particularly low moment at the Playboy Mansion, contemplating suicide. Reading her story you come to understand how someone living in her seemingly glamorous circumstances could come to reach that crushing low.
Holly was born in Alaska where she spent her early childhood before moving to Oregon. From there she set her sights on Los Angeles and ended up moving there for college. She found a job at Hooters and pursued acting on the side in between classes. Various opportunities came up, including a Hawaiian Tropics gig where she met Hugh Hefner’s doctor and got invited to a Playboy party (the annual Midsummer Night’s Eve party). Holly started to get more and more regular invitations to mansion events and started getting to know girls who lived there. Not that she ever imagined herself living there.
One day her two roommates dropped the news that they would be moving back home, leaving Holly unable to pay rent for the apartment they had been sharing. Short on options and thinking it would simply make for a good story, she moved into the Playboy Mansion.
The mansion became her home for the next seven years of her life.
Inside the rest of the book you’ll find all kinds of wild tales – stuff about an international sex ring; celebrity encounters; ghost stories; cattiness to the extreme; what it was really like during group sex with Hugh Hefner; the early 2000s LA party scene; living with an on-site zoo; backstabbing; true friendship; toxic relationships; self-medication; the world of early reality television; being overlooked and underestimated as mere arm candy; the realities of negotiating for every little freedom in an oppressive living situation; and so, so much more.
Review
I loved this book. It has great stories with immersive storytelling that puts you right there in the moment. You feel like you’re with the girls in Bridget’s room as they chat about the latest drama. You’re in the club then the limo as the girls fight over another petty drama. You’re right there as Hef explodes at Holly over her lipstick color. You can practically smell the decades-old dog piss in the carpets.
The through line of this book is how Holly made sense of the madness that was her life at the Playboy Mansion. You’ll understand the things she told herself to justify the decisions she made, and how she almost lost her identity after years of forcing herself into a cookie cutter mold of the person she thought she was supposed to be.
I was impressed with how caught up I felt in the drama – things I would never indulge in my personal life, yet I could fully understand why things felt as colossal as they did in the girls’ bubble of a world. In a toxic environment with people constantly attacking each other, both in your face and behind your back; where status is never guaranteed and must be protected; where every aspect of your physical appearance is picked apart and put on display for the world to see – it’s enough to make anyone lose touch with the reality that exists outside of those mansion gates.
The world of the Playboy Mansion may seem mad from the outside (hence all the Alice in Wonderland quotes and references sprinkled throughout it) but with this book, you truly come to understand how all of that can become someone’s normal reality.
I was fully rooting for Holly as she narrated her story. I’m almost positive this was written with a ghostwriter and I have no problem with that; they did a great job. Now that I’ve seen and listened to so many podcasts and interviews, I feel like Holly’s tone and perspective is captured perfectly in the book. I love the conversational flow of the book and Holly’s take on people and events. We can never know the full truth of someone else’s experience, and there are always multiple sides to a story, but I found Holly a likable and well-balanced narrator.
Interestingly, I think this book was written before Holly got her autism diagnosis. Knowing that as a reader today made it even more interesting to read how she describes some of the things she lived through – even before she herself knew that she was autistic. Knowing a bit about what that’s like, it’s hard to fathom just how stressed she must have felt during some of the moments she describes in her book.
At the end of the day this book is about a young woman growing up in a world few of us will ever experience, during an era in pop culture that can never be replicated, and finding herself and how to advocate for what she believed in through pressures we can only imagine. Toward the end of the book we get to learn more about Holly’s eventual departure from the Playboy Mansion and the life she started to build for herself, eventually choosing to move to Las Vegas. There’s a huge culture shock as she transitions from one life to another, rebuilding her world and identity afresh. It’s a little devastating but also exhilarating and uplifting – as a reader, I really felt like I went on an emotional journey with Holly. Like, that’s my girl! (*Keke Palmer voice*).
Follow up recommendations
This book also introduced me to Holly’s excellent podcast, You Wish, where she mostly interviews people who live and work in Las Vegas. My favorite episodes have been her interviews with Charm Daze, Tana Mongeau, Trisha Paytas, and Dr. Lauren Kerwin (“My Autism Story”). Holly’s a thoughtful but personable interviewer and the conversations are so much fun to listen in on!
After I finished Down the Rabbit Hole I immediately picked up Holly’s next book, The Vegas Diaries: Romance, Rolling the Dice, and the Road to Reinvention – A Memoir of Burlesque and Hollywood Glamour. I’ll write about that in another post but will go ahead and say it was another super fun read!
Did you read Down the Rabbit Hole? What did you think?
Did you watch Girls Next Door? (What was your favorite episode?)
Check out the videos mentioned above here:
Leave a Reply