In the beginning, I was a bit more in control of my actions in front of the camera. The first episode about shopping for the prom was pretty harmless and even charming in a way, and maybe even because of the few dumb things that came out of my mouth. What I didn’t know at the time was that the Lyme disease was going to stage a full frontal assault. I didn’t know that I was going to have a series of mini-breakdowns during the course of the five months of shooting. As those months wore on, nothing about the show felt harmless or charming. In fact, there were moments when I thought I would break emotionally right in front of the camera.

  One Monday late in July, I had just come home from a quick and intense extended-family weekend trip to Nantucket. My dad’s family has a lot of complicated dynamics. I’d just graduated from high school that June, and that weekend my family had asked a lot of questions: “What are you going to do now?” “Are you going to continue with the show? “How about working for your dad?”

  I had to cut the trip short to come home to shoot, and when I woke up Monday morning I realized I had not planned anything for the show, which was my responsibility. The camera crew was on its way and I was alone in Dad’s house. Shit. I might be witty when prompted by others, but alone, I just felt depressed and overwhelmed. I was also terribly hungover from the weekend.

  For a fleeting moment, I had the idea that I’d paint for the camera. Painting was not only my greatest passion; it was my most comforting form of therapy. It was also an extremely personal activity. Back then, my ritual looked something like this: I would put on my painting clothes, usually sweatpants, an old graphic tee, and my Peggy Lipton beanie with all of my hair piled inside it. I would then put Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà vu album on the stereo, roll the perfect joint, take a hit, and then gently tear open the plastic wrap of the canvas the same way a gentleman would seductively begin to make love to his lady. The canvas was my lover. If I’d painted on camera it would have been a huge betrayal of something I cared very deeply about.

  Luckily, for the sake of my art I needed supplies and when I called the art store it was closed.

  That left me without options for activities and I was too tired and Lyme-y to come up with anything else. Sitting around doing nothing is not compelling TV. I began to feel irresponsible. The crew had driven up from the city, people were getting paid, the director was pacing. Although they didn’t say anything to me, I felt pressured to perform for them, or at least to try to think up something interesting for them to film me doing. Jaime had taken up the slack for me when I was away for the weekend, so it was my turn to be filmed alone so Jaime could have a little break.

  My anxiety started to build, and filming began to spiral downward. I began to feel useless, not only as a reality television talent, but as a human being. I then asked myself the one question you really don’t want to ask yourself on camera: What am I going to do with my life?

  I guess I started to feel sorry for myself, but before I start beating myself up for sounding like a spoiled brat, let’s face it: My childhood was screwed up. I’d grown up the eldest of four children and took the role of mother when my mother wasn’t able to be there, which was for considerable amounts of time due to her strenuous hours working and going through bouts of emotional stress from the separation. My relationship with my mother was strained at this point, to say the least. She didn’t understand what I was going through at all, which made me angry, and my anger turned into a deep sadness. My father leaned too much on me emotionally. I grew up way too fast, and without much parental guidance or supervision. In my teens, I was afforded absolutely no boundaries. It was as though my dad felt safer sharing his deepest feelings with me than he did with his wife. To this day, I believe his dependence on me in that way was a big strain on his relationship with my mom.

  I, not my mom, accompanied my dad to all the affairs, dinners, and ceremonies. It was I who stood next to him against the step-and-repeat publicity backdrop while the cameras flashed. It was I who sat in the back of the limo or cab while he poured his heart out about business and deeply personal matters. I shouldn’t have been a confidante, a peer—I should have been a daughter. I needed somebody to guide me and tell me what to do and what not to do. I needed direction and structure.

  That day at my dad’s, I started to feel out of control, scared, and so very lonely. I needed a container to hold what I was going through. My vessel was cracking, melting, crumbling, and I was desperate for somebody to provide the superglue to put it back together.

  You should know that there’s a deep loneliness to Lyme disease because nobody believes you about the pain and confusion. Your family, your friends, and even your doctors tell you it’s all in your head, or that it’s something else that’s easily treatable. You feel like shit and they tell you you’re beautiful, you’re young, and you look fabulous. Wonderful! So you start to fool yourself. Maybe they’re right, you say. Maybe everybody feels just as shitty as I do.

  So when you go through fainting spells, you feel as if you’re going to pass out or throw up, or you have extreme fatigue, joint pain, or crazy migraines, you make excuses up out of thin air: “I went running last week—that’s why my knees hurt.” “I have a headache because I’m dehydrated.” As you pile the lies on top of each other, the distance between you and those close to you grows bigger and bigger until the day you realize you’re in this ordeal all by yourself.

  The confusion, physical pain, and heart palpitations Lyme disease causes are torment enough. Add a hangover, a camera crew for a reality TV show, loneliness, and, well, what you get is just what happened to me: I started to break down.

  And I could think of only one person to talk to about it.

  On the phone with Dad that day I was a lost little girl as the cameras rolled. Although I haven’t seen the episode in many years, remembering now how I exposed myself so publicly still makes me cringe. I came across like the spoiled brat I warned you about, whining and crying about how hard my life was while I was walking around Dad’s swimming pool. This was the first time I got really personal and private on camera. It was actually funny that my attempt at getting deeply personal with kids in New York was my goal, yet I was totally unwilling to reveal what was going on behind closed doors in my own personal life. I think part of me was taking some of my mother’s moral upbringing when it came to privacy, which is even funnier, because filming a reality television show is the exact opposite of being private.

  It was my worst nightmare, and the polar opposite of what I had hoped the show would be.

  I remember feeling scared and lonely and desperate to figure out what I was going to do with my life, something that had meaning. The life I had created with cameras following me around was not the life I intended to lead. I wanted to turn back time and erase what I had done. I wanted to go back into my childhood, before everything became so hard.

  As I poured my heart out to my dad I forgot the cameras. I didn’t think about how I would look on television crying about my life, to families torn apart in much worse ways than mine, to children who had no family to speak of, or to single mothers trying to make ends meet. My life seemed and was pretty damn great compared to most. In a way I suppose I achieved that day, in a small way, what I actually wanted the show to be about: No matter how much you have, how you grow up, where you live, how tall you are, or what skin color you have, we all have issues and life to sort through.

  Obviously mine were petty issues next to racial profiling and murder, but they were symbolic of a daily struggle everyone goes though. Unfortunately, the editing team at MTV didn’t get that the audience may have related to my honest emotions. Nope. They just saw it as a great big opportunity to make fun of a teenage girl going through one of life’s biggest transitions: teenagehood to real adulthood. Actually, what they were seeing was a girl having a Lyme breakdown and starting to shut down.

  After the phone call to my dad, the episode devolved into theater of the absurd. I decided that the only thing that could help me was a burrito. There was nothing in my dad’s refrigerator, and I wasn’t about to order in food and wait for an hour and a half, sitting around being nervous or just flat-out fainting on camera. I thought it would make for an interesting on-camera activity for me to go to the grocery store and buy the ingredients to make burritos.

  Now, picture walking into a small grocery store on a summer holiday, and then picture walking in with a camera crew of four. Seriously? I am actually doing this? No one will let me go anywhere ever again! I also had no idea what kind of specific ingredients went into making a burrito. All I knew was that I needed something to eat and that I had better make something fast or I might pass out. Or maybe my head would just spin right off. That would have made for an interesting episode.

  Once I managed to buy all the ingredients, I walked out to the parking lot with all of my bags in hand, the camera crew in tow, and I stopped to chat with the parking lot attendant. This man was a gentle soul, a man I knew had been through a lot in his life. He was real. He was authentic and grounded. He was what I wanted to be, who I needed to be around.

  “How are you today, Wilfred?”

  “I’m fine, miss. How are you doing on this sunny day?”

  “Well, I am okay. I am going home to make some burritos.…”

  In the back of my mind I was secretly asking him to kidnap me, take me home with him to his little family, where I could live a simple and normal life.

  I gazed into his tired, watery eyes for much longer than I should have, wondering if he could read my mind, if he could understand the agony that I was putting myself through. I wondered if he knew I was different from the other women who drove through his parking lot, impatient and hushing their spoiled, crying children in the backseats of their Mercedes station wagons. I didn’t know why I was making the choices I was making and didn’t have a clue that at least some of my craziness was not my fault at all.

  I arrived home and called one of my closest friends at the time, Danielle. I needed someone else on camera with me and to help me make the burritos. All I wanted was to eat as soon as possible, and in a comfortable environment. My heart had been racing the whole day, my hands felt shaky, and I couldn’t think clearly anymore. Partly this was because of the hangover. But it was also a feeling I often had without having a hangover at all. I didn’t know this then, but Lyme sufferers can feel as though they have a hangover every single day, whether or not they take a single drink. What makes it even more diabolical is you don’t look like absolute death; you just feel that way.

  As soon as Danielle came to the house, I hugged her and immediately began to chop onions. Danielle knew how to make rice, and I knew how to chop onions. We didn’t know how to cook or season ground beef or how to cook beans.

  Danielle began asking me questions. “What do you want to do while the rice is cooking? What kind of seasoning should we put on the beef? Do you need the beans? What about lettuce? Did you know that burritos have a lot of carbs? What do you want to do after we eat? Where do you want to eat? How did the earth come to exist? Why do you think toenails are the shape and color they are? How do I break up with my boyfriend? What are you going to do after the summer? Do you think your parents will ever get back together? What do you want me to help you with? Ally, Ally? Ally? Are you okay…?”

  Brain shutting down. Come back to life, Ally. Come on, make words come out of your mouth.

  “Danielle, I am starving. All I want is to have the rice, with beef, on a plate, and in my mouth, as soon as humanly possible. I feel like I do not know how to make a decision as simple as how much salt I need to shake into the pan right now.”

  “Well, we have a lot of options. We could not eat, eat, order in, sit outside, go upstairs, take a nap.… What do you feel like doing?”

  I grabbed Danielle’s hand and ran outside and we jumped into the swimming pool with all of our clothes on—microphones still attached. I dragged her with me. I didn’t care what happened. I wanted to escape and feel free, and it was the only way to shut her up. It looked like a fun, innocent, and lighthearted thing to do in the moment, but little did anyone know, I was so overwhelmed that all I could do was jump into deep cold water to numb out.

  I knew alcohol wasn’t the answer. I knew I had drunk enough that weekend, and I didn’t want to be totally annihilated on-screen. And all I wanted to do was eat a fucking burrito.

  At some point during the filming I just started to barrel through. I wanted to get the show over with. I will admit that I wasn’t at my best—not by a mile. I was smoking pot just about every night because of my achy joints and the need to escape the harsh reality of making reality TV.

  When my friend Liz Meyer joined Rich Girls, things really became unhinged. Jaime and Liz didn’t get along. It was almost as though they were competing for my friendship. I know that sounds terribly self-centered, but that’s how it seemed to me. The conflict was actually highlighted in the show.

  The discomfort of the situation pervaded every part of my life. The show used a lot of interviews where I was alone and talked right to the camera, a format that is now a reality TV staple. The reason they’re a staple is that there is so much pressure on the person being interviewed—the viewer doesn’t see the camera, the lights, and the crew. But I was defensive and, most of the time, brutally honest.

  One time when we were shooting interviews in a hotel, I was exhausted, so drained. The show wasn’t supposed to create rifts in my relationships. I was fed up with both Jaime and Liz and their childish behavior, and pissed at them because they had put me in this awkward situation. The director was asking me really uncomfortable questions about my friendships and perspectives on Jaime and Liz, questions that I did not feel comfortable answering, because I didn’t want to hurt either of their feelings. Then, in the middle of the interview, I told the crew to turn off the cameras and I walked into a bathroom. I crawled onto the bath mat and began to sob. I felt so trapped, so freaked out, that I just wanted to end my life. The show hadn’t even aired yet and it was killing me.

  I was going a million miles an hour, there was so much scheduling, securing releases from restaurants, hotels, and stores. We were constantly trying to come up with ideas for the show. It was like living a double life in the fast lane.

  By the end of summer, we had already been filming for four and a half months and I was not feeling well. I was nauseous most of the time, and my knees and hips were killing me. Sleeping was becoming increasingly difficult, too, which didn’t help me feel awake and chipper during the day. I remember being aware of how slowly I was speaking from the fatigue. I think it came across on camera as if I was smoking my weed during the day, rather than in the evening. We had planned to shoot a trip to Seattle and I remember telling my mom I didn’t want to go.

  “Well, honey,” she said, “then don’t.”

  Oh, how I wanted to just take a bath, get into my mom’s pretty sheets, curl up in front of the fire, drink chamomile tea, and watch old movies or I Love Lucy. I needed to feel that nostalgia, the warmth. I needed my mommy.

  twelve

  TURNING TO JUDAISM IN A KARAOKE NIGHTCLUB

  “Rarely, patients with undetected Lyme disease may present with obsessive compulsive disorder, paranoia, auditory/visual hallucinations, or full blown mania.”

  —COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

  The first week after the show wrapped is a blur. I remember I painted my head off, which means I smoked a lot of weed, locked myself in my art studio, and experimented on the canvas for hours on end. I went into the city to my dad’s office a few times a week to help him with his collections. I liked to help my dad at work, and he appreciated my opinions.

  Hanging out with my dad after the season wrapped was perfect because it took my mind off Rich Girls and the internal criticism that played on a loop in my thoughts. I went on a business trip with him and his team to attend some press junkets and do some sample shopping. In this kind of shopping you’re looking for inspiration. You travel to stores throughout Europe searching for fabrics, colors, or patterns that kindle your imagination. It’s one of the most enjoyable aspects of designing for a large corporation. I was not technically an employee, but I was a part of the team, and I was the most enthusiastic of the whole group.

  Now that the show was over, I felt as if I’d been let out of jail or saved from a sinking ship. I felt as if I were the luckiest person on earth to be on a sample shopping trip through Europe. We went to Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris. A lot of the trip, however, is lost in my memory.

  When we got back to the States at the end of September, and after attending the show’s premier party in Los Angeles (where I did The Sharon Osbourne Show), we had a launch party in New York. I went to the party with my friend Charlie. I knew Charlie from a guy I was dating, and he had been my most awesome best friend. Charlie did something very unexpected: He kissed me. I was totally shocked. I hadn’t thought of him in a sexual way at all.

  I don’t know how much the kiss had to do with it, but soon after the party I decided to go to Miami to visit Charlie. He was attending the University of Miami at the time and sharing a bungalow in South Beach with a couple of friends. As soon as I arrived, I knew I didn’t want to leave. We were near the ocean, and smell of the sea air and the feel of the sand between my toes reminded me of Mustique. I felt as if I had escaped into a secret special world where I could play house and act like a big kid. With Charlie and his friends I had a blast. We played basketball or went to the beach during the day. At night we’d sing karaoke at a cheesy joint owned by an ex–Garment District guy named Marty, who told me, “I sold mannequins to your father in the eighties.”