FROM TRASH TO TREASURE

I just finished reading Jennifer Saginor's horrible memoir Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion. It had some juicy bits in it, but for the most part it wasn't even fun enough to earn "guilty pleasure" honors.

Now I'm moving on to The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis. I've read that Davis is a fantastic and strange writer, so I'm looking forward to experiencing her weird-o world for the first time.

Portland will be even more bookish than usual this week because the local literary magazine Tin Hat is hosting a slew of readings, seminars and author interviews. I'm hoping to see an interview with Lorrie Moore (who wrote the awesome short story collection Birds of America), and possibly attend a seminar led by Anthony Doerr (author of yet another awesome short story collection, The Shell Collector). Doerr was at Bowdoin at roughly the same time as me, but I never met him to my knowledge.

Back to Playground. Here's the first draft of the review I'm working on:

Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion by Jennifer Saginor
(Harper, $13.95)

Everyone knows that you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but is it okay to be petty about an author photo?
I normally don’t pay much attention to pictures of writers that adorn dust jackets or the lead-in pages to a book. But the mug shot of Jennifer Saginor for her potboiler Playground is so weirdly fascinating that I flipped back to it dozens of times to seek refuge from her wretched prose.
The fuzzy photo depicts a thirty something woman with straight blond hair. She wears sunglasses to deprive us of eye contact, and her hipper-than-thou sneer is anything but inviting.
She aspires to chicness, but Saginor looks so insincere that you can’t help but brace yourself for a bumpy 277 pages.
Playground is an unlikable book for sure, though it must be said that this poor man’s knockoff of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation delivers some moments of sheer guilty pleasure.
Saginor’s dubious claim to fame is that she spent much of her childhood cavorting at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. Instead of doing typical late ’70s/early ’80s girlie stuff like listening to K-tel compilations and playing with Cabbage Patch Kids, she watched John Belushi have sex and started knocking back Quaaludes eons before she had her driver’s permit.
Her father, a famous physician known as “Dr. Feel Good,” was part of Hugh Hefner’s inner circle. Saginor ultimately blames her parents for exposing her to sex, booze and drugs at such an early age, dim-wittedly exonerating Hefner, as though he wasn’t responsible for cultivating this depraved culture in the first place.
“I realize that Hef’s the one person who never wronged me,” she writes. “He allowed me to be a child in his midst.”
The good news for queer readers is that Playground packs some serious lesbian heat, though the pedophilia overtones may make you feel morally queasy. One of Hefner’s girlfriends seduces the underage Saginor, resulting in a long-lasting but ill-fated sex fest.
I’m not sure if it’s to her credit or not, but at moments Saginor effectively captures the Reagan era with her spoiled rich girl attitude and her nostalgic references to Bananarama.
But in the end this book is so clichéd, fuzzily reasoned and self-indulgent that you can’t help but think that the awful author photo says it all.