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| Author Jillian Lauren with her book "My Life in a Harem" |
An Odalisque is defined as a member of an oriental harem: living quarters reserved for wives, concubines and female relatives in a Muslim household. Harems have always been favorite mysterious fantasies of most Westerners. Today’s public believes they are a distant memory of the Middle Ages. Wrong. They still exist and the 19-year old from New Jersey, Jillian Lauren, spent most of two years as part of the Harem in the monarchy of Brunei—an oil soaked Muslim country located on the northern coast of Borneo. The reader doesn’t have to be a hard-core voyeur to find this memoir a page-turner in the manner of The May Flower Madam or Xaviera Hollander’s classic The Happy Hooker. Whatever the reader thinks about the morals of this author, she is a gifted writer as well as a thoughtful and keen observer. At 19 she’d already worked professionally in NYC as an actress and in order to have enough income to live, she had also been a part-time stripper and occasionally worked for an escort agency.
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