In her megabestseller The Happy Hooker and subsequent books, Xaviera Hollander became the candid and racy chronicler of life as a high-class New York madam during the '60s and '70s. Yet her sexual escapades form only a part of Xaviera's remarkable life story -- a story she reveals for the first time in this fascinating and surprisingly uplifting literary memoir. Two months after her birth, Xaviera de Vries and her mother were confined in a prison camp during the WWII Japanese occupation of Indonesia, while her father was imprisoned in another camp. Now, Xaviera revisits her young parents and their world -- her father an intellectual Jewish psychologist and her mother the gorgeous daughter of conventional German parents. With breathtaking frankness, Xaviera paints a portrait of her parents' tempestuous relationship and how it shaped her life. And as she chronicles her entree into the world of prostitution, she reveals for the first time how her parents' lives continued to entwine with her own -- the romantic ideal of her father coloring her romantic life and her jealousy of her mother changing at last into a warm and abiding love.