Pretty

An electrifying debut novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Some Girls.

Bebe Baker is an ex-everything: ex-stripper, ex-Christian, ex-drug addict, ex-pretty girl.

It's been one year since the car accident that killed her boyfriend left her scarred and shaken. Flanked by an eccentric posse of friends, she is serving out a self-imposed sentence at a halfway house, while trying to finish cosmetology school. Amid the rampant diagnoses, over-medication, compulsive eating, and acrylic nails of Los Angeles, Bebe looks for something to believe in before something--her past, the dangerously magnetic men in her life, her own bad choices--knocks her off course again."Jillian Lauren writes with stunning, furious authenticity about self-destruction and the bitter road toward redemption. "Pretty" will knock the breath right out of you."—Janelle Brown, author of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything
 
“PRETTY is the real deal, a harrowing journey from darkness to light  to real life. Bebe’s unflinching, street-level search for salvation absolutely floored me, and Jillian Lauren’s writing shimmers throughout with wit and authenticity.”—Antoine Wilson, author of The Interloper
 
“Pretty is the not-so-pretty, utterly riveting, non-stop frantic and compulsively readable saga of Bebe Baker, a heroine who knows her way around a serious binge. Jillian Lauren renders the taste and feel of wretched excess - be it sex, drugs, food, or Los Angeles - with a savage veracity and style all her own.  The prose, at times, drives with such ferocious urgency that the words seem not so much written as willed  onto the page. Pretty stands out as a triumph of survival testimony. The author, plainly, is lucky to have survived - but the reader is luckier.  Jillian Lauren is the real deal.”—Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
 
“BeBe Baker knows the ugliness of the world, yet finds plain truths in the multicultural pageantry of eastern Los Angeles. She is the kid you want to protect, the girl you’d definitely be friends with, the obliviously fetching female that all the boys love—an unlikely, unforgettable hero with a forever-searching soul. Pretty’s true beauty, however, is the author’s ability to lovingly capture life’s microscopic details—right down to the cuticles—and offer them back up to us as communion.”—Shawna Kenney, author of I Was a Teenage Dominatrix and ImpostersJillian Lauren is a writer, storyteller, mom, and rock-wife. She is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoirs Everything You Ever Wanted and Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, and the novel Pretty. Some Girls has been translated into 18 different languages and is currently being adapted for TV. She has written for The New York Times, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Magazine, Elle, The Daily Beast and Salon, among others.

She lives with her husband, musician Scott Shriner, and their two sons in Los Angeles.
www.jillianlauren.com