Reviews with content warning for Death - Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself

I listened to this as an audiobook over two days and absolutely devoured it. Crystal's ghostwriter has managed to turn her story into a tense and compelling rollercoaster of a narrative that at times had me physically cringing at the situations she endured.

Having watched a few episodes of The Girls Next Door when it first aired, I found the lives and motivations of the women at the Playboy Mansion completely alien and inexplicable. I wanted this book to provide answers as to what compels a young woman to enter into a public relationship with a man 60 years her senior. I was also hoping for an incisive and condemnatory look at Hugh Hefner's wielding of power and treatment of the women in his orbit. This book gave me exactly what I wanted.

Crystal doesn't shy away from discussing some of the more unsavoury aspects of her life in the mansion. While confronting, it didn't come across to me as exploitative, which I feared going into the book. Instead, Crystal connects these experiences to the way Hefner treated his relationships with women in smaller, more insidious ways. The book goes even further, drawing a through line between Crystal's experience of dehumanisation and abuse at the hands of Hefner and the Playboy Corporation, through to the way society manipulates and degrades women in myriad ways.

Crystal isn't a natural narrator, and at times she seemed to stumble over sections of the text, but overall it was satisfying to hear her story in her own voice.

I would have eaten up a few more chapters about Crystal's life beyond the mansion, the steps she took to reacclimatise to life outside, and the process of recontextualising her experience with Hefner in the context of the #metoo movement, but you can't have everything!

I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone and everyone who has had any interaction with the Playboy brand over the past 70 years.

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meganliliane95's review

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dark emotional inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.25

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kloughlin's review against another edition

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emotional medium-paced

3.5

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daphnehumming's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

3.75

It was a well written memoir. As always, I wanted a bit more of the healing process to be covered. I felt like I understood fairly well life in the Playboy Mansion and Crystal read well in the book.

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rachreads925's review against another edition

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informative reflective sad medium-paced

3.5

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lovelymisanthrope's review

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dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

I was very excited to read this because I have recently been enthralled with "The Girls Next Door", and I wanted to learn more about another person's perspective of Playboy and Life at the mansion.
"Only Say Good Things" is a memoir from Crystal Hefner, Famous Playboy founder Hugh Hefner's final wife. This novel sheds some light on Crystal's life before the mansion, and how she found herself living what everyone believed was the dream life. It also chronicles Hugh Hefner's final days.
Overall, I thought this book was organized well, was well written, and was informative as well as entertaining. I think Crystal did a great job at trying to explain herself and share the mental state she was in during her time at the mansion. Hearing her perspective on what was happening at the mansion during her time there gave me more sympathy for the atrocities she went through.
I continue to be fascinated by the world of Playboy, and I look forward to indulging in more media like this in the future.

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