The Vegas Diaries: Romance, Rolling the Dice, and the Road to Reinvention

T
O
J
OE AND
M
AMA
I
RENE

F
irst and foremost, thank you so much for deciding to come along on this journey with me. With
The Vegas Diaries,
my goal is to share with you a period of time that was very important to me and one that turned into the best time in my life up to that point. Chapter one begins in the spring of 2009. I was at my own personal rock bottom: I had just checked out of the Playboy mansion (which I talk about at length in my first book,
Down the Rabbit Hole
) and back into the real world and had gone through two back-to-back, and very public, breakups.

I chose to start over. I had no job, no leads, very few real friends, a mountain of mistakes behind me and a reputation as a reality show bimbo that was going to prove very hard to shake. I picked myself up off the ground, got out of town, and reinvented myself on my own terms.

It’s this story of learning to find my confidence and self-sufficiency, set in the wild and crazy world of Las Vegas, that I want to share. Of course, no woman is an island and there are many people I interacted with over the three-year period I cover in this book. Some of them have chosen to live their lives in public view, others have not. It’s not my intention to embarrass anyone and I have taken great care to disguise the identities of many of the players who shared this time with me. To that extent, some of the names you will see in the book are real. Others are pseudonyms,
in which case identifying details have also been changed. To ease the flow of the narrative and to protect people’s privacy, a few of the characters are composites. However, all of the events in the story are based on actual events. All of the stories you will read, how they affected me, and how they made me feel are true. This book is about me and the lessons I learned. People come in and out of our lives. We learn about them and we learn from them. I was fortunate to have all these characters come into my world when they did, because each and every one of them taught me something and contributed to my personal growth.

There comes a time in all of our lives where we have to roll the dice, take a chance, and start over. This was mine. Thank you again for joining me on this wild ride.