As you may know, my first book, The Next Trapeze, is still looking for a home. In the meantime, I’m helping my friend  Kelly Tough, Playboy’s Miss October 1981, write her memoir. It’s entitled “Tough Enough,” for obvious reasons. Here’s a description I wrote for the back of Kelly’s book:

“Living in the Playboy Mansion was the least interesting chapter of Kelly Tough’s life.

Raised in a broken, dysfunctional family, Kelly suffered years of childhood sexual abuse. Homeless at 14, she survived on her looks, working in nightclubs until discovered by a Playboy photographer. She reached the pinnacle of sexual objectification as a Playmate of the Month, and thought this would satisfy her need for love and acceptance. Before she realized she would achieve neither, she slid into a decadent life of cocaine, B-list actors and group sex.

Once discarded by an industry searching for the next teenager to exploit, she had nothing to trade except her brief flirtation with fame. When her promotional opportunities dried up, Kelly supported her drug addiction for 25 years by manufacturing drugs for criminal organizations. During this time, Kelly lived inside a country and western song, looking for love in all the wrong places. Most men she dated beat her, cheated her, or gave her drugs. 

After an incident involving her near-death at the hands of a Hell’s Angel, Kelly went to rehab and withdrew from her gangster network. She relaunched her life on her own terms, without relying upon men to validate her worth, or drugs to dull her emotional pain.

Tough Enough is the intimate memoir of Kelly’s search for love and self-worth in a world of users, abusers, drugs and criminals. Other Playmates have written prurient exposés of life in the Playboy Mansion, step-by-step accounts of Hugh Hefner’s bedroom rituals. Tough Enough doesn’t shy away from Kelly’s carnal side; far from it. But the Mansion was merely one stop on Kelly’s journey from disposable sexual plaything to drug addict to crystal meth hustler, ending with her surprising redemption.

Part Playboy’s The Girls Next Door, part Breaking Bad, part A Million Little Pieces (but true!), Tough Enough is the ultimate story of survival.”