Hot Pants in Hollywood

LOCAL AUTHOR

“We write to make sense of life, to examine it, and then have some control over it. Perhaps to be the heroines of our calamities, this time around. Or so we hope.”

Hot Pants in Hollywood by Susan Silver is a gem of an entertainment memoir. She guides us chronologically through her life, beginning with her childhood with incredibly over-protective parents who wouldn’t let her cross the road until she was twelve, yet who took her to star-studded parties at her uncle’s house. It would be with this uncle, CY Howard, that she would stay when she moved to California to attend UCLA during her junior year. And it would be in California that her life would really get interesting.

Each chapter is full of laugh-out-loud moments with a healthy dose of down-to-earth reality. She tackles the kinds of issues most women have faced, such as dating and college, even while dropping in a serious amount of Hollywood dirt. In the chapter titled “College Years,” she lists eleven people who she never slept with, ranging from Jim Morrison (“I still to this day cannot reconcile the Jim Morrison I knew with the tragic idol.”) to Bill Cosby (“I guess with what came out much later about his alleged drugging of women, I was lucky. Really lucky!”), with a fantastic Elvis story thrown in!

The most interesting sections of the book, however, are not the affairs, or near-affairs, she has had, but those moments when she talks about her family and her work. When she discusses the chaos that was her childhood, her artistic yet socially-backward father and her perfect, terrifying mother, all set against the bland backdrop of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, we feel most connected to her. She is just like most of us who, as young women, longed to leave our small town behind and search for glamour and fame in the big city. She is also like many of us, who, having chased our dreams and moved as far away from our confining upbringings, find ourselves right back where we began to care for our parents or others. It is in these moments where she is most vulnerable and honest that her writing is the best and her unbeatable spirit shines through.

Silver’s memoir reads less like a tell-all and more like a dishy chat with a gal pal over day drinks. Grab a mimosa and some snacks, prop your feet up, and get enjoy this rollicking good read!