What I’m Reading: The Real Girl Next Door

The Real Girl Next Door is a candid yet sometimes opaque look into Denise Richards’s life through the demise of her first marriage and adoption of her third daughter, Eloise. While Denise does discuss her midwestern childhood and her Catholic roots in this memoir, the title of this book does not seem to represent who she is. As many readers may recall from the early 2000’s, Denise was a Playboy playmate and wife to Hollywood bad boy Charlie Sheen. Being a Playboy pinpup and marrying a wild man like Charlie Sheen is not the typical resume of the average Girl Next Door so Denise’s chosen title for her memoir feels like a misnomer.

The book attempts to persuade the audience that Denise was a girl next door who had some public challenges and there is a case to be made for that. But oddly, Denise sometimes tersely represents the most painful experiences of her life as if she were skating over them. In other words, this book can feel oddly distant and abbreviated when she writes about the arguably dangerous relationship she had with her drug addled first husband, Charlie Sheen, and the aftermath of that relationship. That being said, she does cover this painful part of her life and readers unfamiliar with the situation may come away surprised that this Hollywood star has lived such a challenging and risky life before age forty (this book was written right about twenty years ago).

It is hard to comprehend how tersely and pleasantly Denise writes about the public nightmares she has endured–mainly the abuse she suffered at the hands of Charlie, and then the public blame she received for being a homewrecker once she began dating Richie Sambora. And while it could be that Denise is just that upbeat and evolved of a person, it could also be that she is being overly polite and uncontroversial so as to not upset the co-parenting she had to endure at that time with Charlie. Which is very understandable, but then why write a memoir at all if you must be politically correct in the writing of your life?

The reader may come away feeling somewhat surprised that the star of the movie Wild Things does not want to share in detail the private parts of her life. Fortunately Denise has no problem sharing about her multiple boob jobs or her positive experience on the Howard Stern show, but her efforts at autobiographical introspection seem overly filtered.

Which begs the same question that was posed for Christy Brinkley’s Uptown Girl memoir- why write a memoir if you are not willing to truly share your feelings and bare your soul? Again, the answer could be that Denise is that pleasant and resilient of a person that she does not get caught up in the minutia of her feelings and worries. The public spectacle Denise has suffered would break the average Joe, but according to her memoir it does not faze her. Maybe Denise’s millionaire status with a team of people helping her softens the blow that would cause most of us to falter. It is hard to say from reading this book.

BOTTOM LINE: It is hard to say who Denise Richards really is from this book. Her writing, while grounded in factual media accounting of what has transpired in her life up until mid-life, seems at times filtered and protective. It is understandable that anyone, especially a divorced mother of young children, would be cautious when writing an autobiography/ But then why do it in the first place? The writer will learn some interesting details about Denise’s extreme life, but will walk away feeling they read about a nice young woman who somehow suffered public nightmares with a smile. And lastly, since the writing of this memoir (approximately two decades ago) Denise has undergone even more upsetting public brawls (such as the demise of her second marriage to a man she claimed violently beat her). Perhaps Denise could have put off writing her memoir until she hit at least hit fifty-five and should have realized that naming this book The Real Girl Next Door does not accurately represent her life.