Paris: A Memoir for Young Women in the Age of Influencers

by Paris Hilton

and Harajuku Bitch, the OG chihuahua. Shout out to Harajuku Bitch! She’s twenty-two years old. Multiply that by seven dog years; she’s literally 154! She sleeps twenty-three hours a day and looks like Gizmo from Gremlins, but she’s still here living her best life. I know one night I’ll come home to find she’s fallen asleep forever. I’m so scared of that night, and I hate that random intrusive thought. Intrusive thoughts are my nemesis, cutting through my joy even when I’ve been part of an epic event with people who lift me higher than high and my husband is up in bed waiting patiently for me to take my bath and do my skin-care routine, which he knows I never shortcut.

From the time my sister and I were little girls, our mom instilled in us the value of skin care; I always feel her with me in the soothing ritual. Skin care, if you’re doing it right, means claiming a moment of tenderness in an abrasive world. You remove the mask—your brave face, your funny face, your enforcer face, your hard candy coating—and see yourself, cleansed and replenished, and it’s like, “Okay. I’m good.” You feel everything so keenly when you’ve just washed your face. Like a newborn feels that first sting of fresh air. Kim Kardashian and I were making frittata and French toast coated with Frosted Flakes for breakfast one morning, and she said, “I don’t know anyone who parties as hard as you do and looks as good as you do.” Skin care. Seriously. If you take nothing else from my story, receive this: Skin care is sacred. Most women who did coke back in the 1990s looked beat by the mid-aughts. That was a strong deterrent for me. I won’t say I never tried it, but I wasn’t about to sacrifice my complexion for it. Same with cigarettes. You may as well hit yourself in the face with a shovel. These days, my only bad habit is spray-tanning. My sister Nicky can’t stand it, but I’m kind of addicted. Otherwise, Carter and I are big on wellness and skin care. We always say, “Forever’s not long enough.” Taking care of ourselves is something we do for each other out of love. We want our good life to last. After I put the frittata in the oven and set a cute little penguin timer,...

I, like 5 percent of children and 2.5 percent of adults, am a primitive badass in a world of contemporary thinkers, a world that wants obedience and conformity. Even if we wanted to be the orderly people our loved ones want us to be, we don’t have it in us. We must embrace who we are or die trying to be someone else.

I was never medicated as a kid—never tested for ADHD, as far as I know. Even if you have the most wonderful, loving parents in the world (and I do), diagnosis doesn’t always happen early, especially for girls who are good at hiding the symptoms. Treatment of ADHD has traditionally focused on squashing undesirable behavior. In the 1980s, people had just started talking about being hyper or being on “the spectrum.” No one ever said, “Relax, little girl. There are many different kinds of intelligence.” Instead, people told me I was dumb, bratty, careless, ungrateful, or not applying myself. And none of that was true. I had to be creative and work hard to fit in, but I’m naturally creative and hardworking, so I was in it every day, grinding away, trying to fit in, until I grew strong enough to say, “Fuck fitting in,” which is what I intend to teach my children from the beginning, no matter what their neurodevelopmental profile happens to be. As an adult, I’ve been medication-fluid. When I was in my early twenties, a doctor explained what was “wrong” with me and put me on Adderall. That was a love/hate relationship that went on for about twenty years—me and Adderall—until Carter and I met with Dr. Hallowell. Dr. Hallowell said, “I’ve been trying to explain to people since 1981 that this condition, if you use it properly, is an asset composed of qualities you can’t buy and can’t teach. It’s stigma that holds us back. Stigma plus ignorance. A lethal combination.” I felt that ligh...

There is a hierarchy, and these are the rules in my family: If you don’t talk about a thing, it’s not a problem. If you hide how deeply something hurt you, it didn’t happen. If you pretend not to notice how deeply you hurt someone else, you don’t have to feel bad about it. Of course, that’s bullshit, and what makes it even crazier: It’s not good business. I come from a family of brilliant businesspeople. How can we be so bad at emotional economics? Relationships, professional and personal, are transactional. Give and take. For better or worse. You invest, hoping for a good return. But there’s always risk.

There are so many young women who need to hear this story. I don’t want them to learn from my mistakes; I want them to stop hating themselves for mistakes of their own. I want them to laugh and see that they do have a voice and their own brand of intelligence and, girl, fuck fitting in.

Never regret anything, because at one time it was exactly what you wanted. MARILYN MONROE

Your twenty-first birthday is prime real estate for stupid, and a lot of stupid things you do in your twenties lay the foundation for wisdom later on. As you wise up, you realize that all the stupid things you didn’t do—those are the regrets.

In my early teens, I took advantage of every sneak-out opportunity I could create. I became one of those Desperately Seeking Susan club kids who ruled the nighttime world in the early nineties. The vogue dancers and drag queens took me under their wings and watched out for me, which is how I learned the key elements of partying like a rock star: Stay hydrated. Stay pretty (tipsy can be cute, but drunk is gross). Wear boots—like good, sturdy platform boots—and comfortable clothes so you can dance all night and easily climb in and/or out of windows and over fences as needed. I didn’t drink or do drugs back then. When I was a kid, fun was the only party drug I needed. I wasn’t there to get wasted; I was there to dance. Alcohol and drugs are for escaping reality, and I wanted all the reality I could get. The escape drinking didn’t happen until later.

the rule at every gig I DJ in my virtual world or in real life: When you party with Paris, you dance.

We all have that jump door inside us, and for a long time, I marked mine with red letters. All caps. THIS DOOR MUST REMAIN CLOSED Brace yourselves, bitches. We’re about to pry it open.