Title: Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny
Author: Holly Madison
Category: Autobiography
Published: June 23, 2015
“If I just put my head under the water and take a deep breath in, it would all be over, I thought”.
In 2006, the E! network premired it’s newest reality TV show The Girl’s Next Door which followed the lives of three women, Holly Madison, Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt also known as Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends. Until then, Playboy was generally known as an adult magazine but once GND became a hit it was not uncommon to see teenage girls with Playboy paraphanalia with them, be it a shirt with the bunny logo, a bunny rihnestone necklace or a fleece throw with the bunny stamped all over it. If you asked any teenage girl at that time what they thought life as a bunny would be like they would likely answer with “Glamourous, amazing or every girl’s dream”. In 2008 the movie The House Bunny premiered and seemed to back up the notion that life at the Playboy mansion would be a dream come true. Upon reading Holly Madison’s book, I learned that it was closer to a nightmare than a dream,
For those of you that may not know who she is, Holly Madison was, for a number of years, one of Hugh Hefner’s main girlfriends and starred in the hit E! reality show Girls Next Door. Holly’s recounting of her time at the mansion is both intriguing but also heartbreaking. It’s fasinating to hear of all of the mean girl drama between all of the women living at Mansion throughout the years but the manipulation and body shaming that went on behind closed doors is hard to read. I originally picked up this book at the suggestion of a friend who thought it would be a way for my to occupy my time during a 3 hour flight. Whether you were ever a fan of Girls Next Door or not and even if you never found yourself wanting anything with the famed bunny logo on it, this is still a fantastic read. If nothing else is taken away from this book, take away this: You can do anything, it may take you longer than you expected and you will encounter people who will try to drag you down but if you really work for it, you can achieve it.
Down The Rabbit Hole details Holly Madison’s life though her years as a Playboy Bunny, during her Las Vegas residency for the hit burlesque show Peepshow, all the way through the birth of her daughter, Rainbow Aurora, and marriage to Electric Daisy Carnival creator, Pasquale Rotella.