51 pages • 1 hour read
Paris HiltonParis: The Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary
Hilton is allowed to call her mother under supervision, but the phone is taken away when she tries to tell her mother what is happening. Hilton starts having to go to Propheets which contain lectures and exercises. For example, a student may be forced to bite down on a towel and keep their head on the ground while another person tries to pull them off the ground with the towel. People are seriously injured at times. Afterward, there is a Rap that lasts the entire night.
During a lecture, Hilton manages to get permission to go to the bathroom where she crawls out a window above a toilet and runs. She runs until she finds a payphone, where she calls her Aunt Kyle. Her aunt insists on knowing where she is, and while Hilton waits for her aunt, a school enforcer arrives, having been called by Kyle. The enforcer brings her back to the group, and she is beaten and choked. There are rumors that CEDU kids have died in the woods. James Lee Crummel is connected with the deaths of two CEDU boys, and he frequently goes to the school with the staff psychologist, who, over the years, lived with two convicted sex offenders.
While writing her memoir, Hilton tries to think of things that make her happy. She remembers when she snuck out a bathroom window to escape a party with Britney Spears where neither woman to remain. She describes a feud she supposedly had with Lindsey Lohan, but the two never feuded. Lohan and Hilton talk to paparazzi, and then Lohan gets in the car with Hilton and Spears, creating the iconic photo people have seen of the three of them sitting in a two passenger car. Hilton understands that people take those photos because they make a lot of money, though the subjects of the photos do not receive compensation. What she does not understand are the hateful comments people make online.
Hilton explains that the Rap pits the students against each other and distracts them from what is really happening around them. In the years since she left the schools, she has tried to get the Rap out of her head, but she cannot find music loud enough to do that. She is horrified by some of the things she said to other people during Rap. After Hilton left the schools, she drank alcohol to numb the memories, though that is not the only reason she drank. She says that sometimes people would tell her things she had said while she was drunk, and she does not remember them. However, she believes that she may have said these things because CEDU messed up her filter and taught her how to express hurtful comments to others.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary
Two transporters come to take Hilton to Ascent . She tries to charm them, and she convinces the woman, who she calls Mrs. Meathead, to take off her handcuffs and take her to the bathroom. Mrs. Meathead is outside the stall when Hilton kicks it as hard as she can and runs. She tries to get to the Hilton hotel in the San Francisco airport because she believes she will find safety there. She gets to the hotel and tells the concierge that she needs a cab because her boyfriend is after her. She successfully speeds away in a cab. She goes to the downtown Hilton hotel and calls her mother. Her mother tells her that she can come home, but unbeknownst to her, her parents put a wiretap on their phone when Hilton ran away from CEDU the first time. Shortly after, a police officer arrives to pick her up.
Hilton arrives at Ascent, which she describes as having “a crew-cut-and-camo white supremacist vibe to” it (143). She is strip searched in front of people yet again. Again, they must shower under supervision. Boys and girls cannot look at each other at this camp. It is a rough camp and kids sometimes pass out, and they are beaten. She asks her tentmate if she wants to escape. They agree, but after the girl leaves to go to the bathroom, Hilton is called out. She has to sit on a log until she confesses to planning an escape, but she does not want to get her tentmate in trouble. The adult, who Hilton calls Burly, feels she needs to prove to the other students that she can break Hilton, so she hits and strangles her and tells her that her parents hate her. Hilton is terrified, and from then on, she does what she is supposed to and plays the role of the “blonde bimbo” that is so familiar to her. She has since learned that this place has been shut down and that children died at Ascent.
Hilton is told that she has to do Track/Trek, a hike over mountains. This is supposed to be life changing for students. She has been warned that there are wild animals, but she wonders if she tries to escape if it is better to run or to hide. She tells one girl, who she names Tess, that she wants to leave, and Tess says she will go with her. They escape to some mobile homes, and a woman in one of them takes them in and gets them cleaned up. Hilton calls a friend in Los Angeles. Just as the two are about to make it onto a train, a man from the camp comes. Everyone at camp is strip searched and has to have a cavity exam.
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary
Hilton is told that Track/Trek is how a person graduates from Ascent. She is told that at the end of the journey, her parents will be there. She makes it through the three weeks of hiking, keeping in mind the thought of going home with her family. The students have to do a days-long vision quest where they sit around a fire in a sweat lodge and can only leave for the bathroom. They are given little food and water and kids occasionally pass out. Hilton makes it through the vision quest, and instead of going home, she is told her parents will meet her in Reading to take her to Cascade because she still has one more year to complete the program.
Hilton meets with her parents and begs them to take her home. Her mom tells her that since there is only one more year until she is an adult, this is the last chance they have to save her life. She convinces her mom to take her to get her hair done on the way to the school. Hilton tells them that she needs to use the restroom, and she climbs out the bathroom window and runs. She steals money from her mother’s purse and gets on a Greyhound bus. Eventually, she falls asleep just to open her eyes to a police officer. A counselor is there to take her to Cascade, her new school. She again is strip searched, but she feels nothing when this happens. She realizes that the strip searches are intended to be an invasion of privacy and to prove that those in charge have control over the students’ bodies. She realizes that these sexual assaults are about the perpetrators, not the students they choose to assault. She has been able to hide the money she stole from her mom. She decides that one day she will have so much money that nothing like this will ever be able to happen to her again.
She meets a girl named Mouse who asks her to take her with her if she runs. At Raps, Mouse is frequently accused of tempting her uncle into making him do sexual things to her. Mouse and Hilton escape, and they use some of the money to buy disguises. A friend in Bel Air has told Hilton that she can stay with him. Eventually Hilton figures it is safe to go outside, and she creates a character she names Amber Tyler who “had never been roofied or strip-searched or slapped around” (158). Afraid to overstay her welcome, she goes to visit a friend named Biff in New York. She knows she cannot take Mouse with her, so Hilton takes her to Denny’s, gives her all her money, and escapes out back.
Hilton still feels guilty about abandoning Mouse. She does not want to think about what could have become of her. She believes that in her attempt to save her, she actually threw “her to the wolves” (159). Biff and Hilton go to the city one day for lunch, and her dad and some transporters come in. Hilton writes about Repo! The Genetic Opera. This is a father/daughter story. Hilton realizes that sometimes fathers make bad choices and that fathers are more than the sum of their worst moments.
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary
As an adult, Hilton’s parents have told her that they toured the facility before they sent her to Provo, but she does not believe they would have sent her there had they seen the straightjackets and the solitary confinement. Unlike the strip and cavity searches at the other facilities, she has to undergo a pelvic exam at Provo. Like the Raps she previously experienced, they have group therapy at Provo where again they tear each other down. Hilton tries to avoid the drugs they give her, but she is caught and is sent to Obs, which is what they call isolation. She cannot throw too much of a fuss because her pants will be pulled down, and she will be given “booty juice.” She does not know what is in the booty juice syringe, but it makes kids go limp. In the Obs stall, there is feces and blood on the wall. Hilton is ordered to take off her clothes, and all that is in the room is “a bucket and a roll of toilet paper on the cement floor near a drain hole” (169). Kids are not allowed to even wear underpants or a bra because they may use them to die by suicide while in isolation. To escape, she creates a beautiful home in her mind. To Hilton, “a creative mind is a limitless empire” (173).
Hilton says that Provo Canyon School tried to take everything from her, but they could not take her creativity that is at her core. Hilton misses her siblings, and she is incredibly angry at her parents. She worries, whenever she ends up in Obs, that she will become like some of the other kids—a zombie. She becomes determined to make herself into such a success that she will never end up so powerless again. She does not want to rely on trust, entitlement, or inheritance. Hilton’s family comes to visit at Christmas. Hilton asks her father to get her out, and then she threatens to tell the Wall Street Journal everything that happens to her. Two weeks later, she is told that she can go home. Hilton credits her parents for raising a fighter who constantly tried to escape and was not fragile.
Part 2, Chapters 9-12 Analysis
Most of the activities described at the schools Hilton attends seemingly serve no distinctive purpose, making them appear arbitrary and meant to inflict either psychological or physical pain. As Hilton has previously explained, she describes what happens to her as she remembers it. Therefore, it is possible that some of the events she describes have been filtered through her memories and are explained in a less than accurate way. It is also possible that the situations Hilton and the other students were put through were purely abusive. Rap is one of these activities. While a justification could be made that it can be helpful for troubled teens to see their behaviors through the eyes of others, the way the Raps are described by Hilton appear to have no merit. In addition, the activity in which a student has to keep their head on the ground while another purposely tries to lift their head with a towel appears to be a form of torture. Indeed, people are injured. Only one side of the story is given, so the reader cannot know what the intended purpose of these activities is, but if Hilton’s story is to be taken at face value or is even to be shown to be skewed a bit, the facilities she resided in were organizations steeped in abuse.
As Hilton tells her story of attempted escape, beating, and choking, and then of the sex offender who would repeatedly go to the school, she stops her narrative of the past and starts to write about events from her life in the future—events that are calming to her and that she enjoys. This demonstrates two key points about Hilton’s mental processes. First, it demonstrates how her mind works in a stream-of-consciousness style and how she will frequently move from one idea or thought to the next, thematically supporting The Blessings and Hardships of ADHD. Second, it shows one of her primary coping mechanisms. While locked away, she would escape in her mind to, at least psychologically, leave the terrors of her present moment. Now, while she is writing her memoir, she is physically safe, but the memories still pose psychological dangers, and she retreats from them in her mind. When she is locked up, she escapes to an imaginary future. While she tells her story, she mentally goes back to pleasant times in her younger years after she is released from the schools.
Hilton remains committed, throughout the novel, to not deny when she has done wrong because she believes in Taking Responsibility for One’s Actions. It will later be explained that Elliot Mintz told her that this was the best way to handle anything when the press finds out she made a mistake. She did this in earlier sections of her memoir when she took responsibility for the heartache that her behavior as a young teen caused her parents. Here, she takes responsibility for the things that she said in Rap and the things that she said while drunk in the years after she leaves the schools. She acknowledges that outside factors played a part in what she said. Rap was an intense environment, and she says it damaged her filter. Still, she apologizes for her words, and as such, her memoir helps her to take ownership over past and present behavior rather than trying to explain it away. This will continue to be a prominent theme in later chapters.
