Playground A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion (an excerpt)

You are six years old. Every day after school your father takes you to a sprawling castle filled with exotic animals, bowls of candy, and half-naked women catering to your every need. You have your own room. You have new friends. You have an uncle Hef who's always there for you.

Welcome to the world of Playground, the true story of a young girl who grew up inside the Playboy Mansion.

When she was six, Jennifer Saginor swam into John Belushi having sex with a Playmate in the Playboy Mansion jacuzzi. By fifteen, she'd tried every drug under the sun, had sex with men and women, lost interest in school, and been legally separated from her mother and younger sister.

Jennifer's memoir, PLAYGROUND: A CHILDHOOD LOST INSIDE THE PLAYBOY MANSION, is a candid, shocking, and addictive read. At times voiced with a sort of prescient detachment that broke through the fog of her over-stimulated adolescence, PLAYGROUND is at once a stirring memoir and a fascinating look at a very particular time and place in American culture.

Daughter of Hugh Hefner's personal physician and close friend (nicknamed "Dr. Feelgood from the Motley Cruë song), Jennifer Saginor came of age in the grottos of the Playboy mansion, where Jennifer spent every Thursday and alternate weekends after her parents divorced.

As a young girl, the Mansion held the promise of instant cheeseburgers, an awesome pool, and an endless supply of gumballs. But soon, it became a place where she learned to check out chicks with her father, inheriting and internalizing each misogynistic and manipulative comment.

She watched her naked father cavort with a revolving-door of beautiful women. She learned what pretty was (and what it was not), she learned to ignore the pitying looks of her friends' parents, she learned that Xanax is how to make it through the day, and she triumphed at the Pac Man game in the Mansion's Arcade.
Saginor's crystalline writing belies the haze of drugs, fear, and loneliness that marked much of her formative years. She missed out on a mother, friends, and a place to turn when things got out of control. Maturing too rapidly in some areas, Jennifer never grew up in others. Her sensibilities and experiences were shaped by a sort of hyper-aroused dream state interrupted only by near fatal car crashes and surreal encounters with the dark underbelly of her reality.