PARIS HILTON

animal.” “Give it a proper hug,” he advises. So I do. I don’t know if it’s real or not, but it doesn’t matter. It feels amazing.

The next day, I meet Hilton in a cork-wrapped room at the studio where she is recording the audio version of Paris: The Memoir. The book is explicitly structured to mimic Hilton’s ADHD, allowing anecdotes about skydiving or camping out in Ibiza or partying with her famous friends to pop up and provide comic or other relief. Still, reading it out loud day after day has been … a lot, even for the engineers recording it. “I was like, ‘Sorry guys. It’s kind of a crazy story,’ ” she says, laughing. “And they’re like, ‘Yeah, when we heard we were doing a Paris Hilton book, this is definitely not what we were expecting.’ ”

In a lot of ways, Hilton is not quite what one would expect either, especially not today, in a black tracksuit and baseball cap, with an unmade face and her hair stuffed haphazardly through a rubber band at the nape of her long neck. Again, she’s in sock feet, which she draws up under her on a small sofa in one corner of the darkened studio (“I feel like a smurf,” she says of the moody blue lighting). Most striking is the lack of any sort of overt performance of femininity; she projects a physical stillness that makes me aware of my own performance of gender — the way I move my hands, how my voice rises when I laugh. In the book, she writes about coming to the realization that she is a performance artist, and that her body is her medium. For years, there was a safety to the performance, she tells me: “It was like, ‘I’m acting, and they can talk and make fun of that character or do whatever. It’s not me. It’s me, playing something else.’ I think it didn’t hurt me as much,” she says of society’s approbation. “Because I was like, ‘Honey, I’m laughing all the way to the bank. Come on.’ ”

The first time Hilton told anyone — and this includes her family — about what had happened to her at the youth treatment centers, she was on camera for This Is Paris, bleary-eyed with jet lag, unable to sleep, and surprised with the words that were coming out of her mouth as director Alexandra Dean sat on her hotel bed with a handheld camera. She immediately told Dean that what she’d said could not be in the film. “But the next day she came to me with all this research showing me that hundreds of thousands of kids are being sent to these places every year. And my mind was blown. I’m like, ‘I can’t believe this is still happening two decades later.’ ” She realized that speaking up could possibly stop it from happening in the future.

And it has. Hilton’s advocacy has since changed the laws in five states. Plus, she says, as counterintuitive as it may be, there are personal advantages to working out one’s trauma in public, with a camera rolling. “They were just such hard subjects to talk about in the beginning that it kind of made it more comfortable that other people were there, maybe,” she says. Speaking with her family about what she’d been through, as she does throughout Paris in Love, she’d been able to frame the conversations as a choice by producers. “It’s kind of like, ‘They told me to ask you — it’s not me,’ ” she says of raising the topics. She pulls her hair out of the rubber band and then hastily ties it back again. “The only therapy that I’ve had,” she says, “is literally this book and the movie.”

But here’s the thing: It’s worked. As bad as things were in the past, she wants me to understand that so many parts of her life are so beautiful now in the present. Tonight she’ll go home and lie with Phoenix on her chest and just look at him looking at her. She’ll have a bubble bath with Reum. In the morning, perhaps they’ll walk their dogs around their beautiful grounds and ride their electric bikes around their beautiful gated community. She can still go out and about with a little subterfuge (“I like going to the Melrose Flea Market in disguise and buying all these random things”). Just a few nights ago, she had dinner with Nicole Richie (“like, a double date, which is fun; we live two minutes away”). And — imagine! — she recently skipped out on DJ’ing for President Biden and other heads of state to attend Britney Spears’ wedding (“she’s already been through so much, so I only like to talk about happy things with her, fun things, clothes and music and puppies”). She’s working on her deepfake and on her virtual reality Paris World with the goal, she tells me, of extending her likeness into the metaverse “so I can be at home and a mom but still do [things].” (She just completed the firstever fragrance signing in the metaverse; a million people attended.) She’s releasing her 30th perfume and working on a new album, combing through the 200 songs that have been sent to her from friends like Miley Cyrus and Meghan Trainor. After hearing Justin Bieber’s “Lonely,” she DM’d Benny Blanco to say how much she related to it and what a dream it would be to make music with him, so now — guess what? — she is. This, in other words, is the life of a real person, having a real and amazing human experience that’s only gotten more real and amazing the more she’s packaged its reality for us.

Take, for instance, how she introduced her mom to Phoenix, inviting Kathy Hilton over as if it were any regular day, then presenting her with both a blue Chanel bag — “I was like, if I give her Chanel first, maybe she won’t be so upset that I didn’t tell her about this” — and with the grandson who, until that moment, Kathy had no idea existed. “I was holding the baby on my shoulder with a blanket over him, and then I just sat down. She’s like, ‘What is that?’ And I was like, ‘A baby … meet your grandson.’ She’s like, ‘Is this yours?’ And she starts crying. She’s like, ‘Let me hold him. He’s the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen in my life. Oh, he’s so beautiful.’ She was just in tears.”

It was such a real moment, full of real emotion. And, amazingly, all this realness — in a twist that would feel surreal to 99.999999 percent of people on Earth — was captured by the cameras of Paris in Love.

Before I leave the studio, I tell Hilton about getting trapped on her grounds — wandering around her estate like some wayward member of the Bling Ring until an assistant helped me find the button to push that would let me out. I tell her that it made me wonder if she also sometimes felt trapped, pinned between a person and a persona, between a public life and a private one, constantly teasing out where an experience should be filed. But she wants me to know that it’s not like that, not exactly, not anymore. She feels vindicated now; she feels purpose. She finally has control over her own narrative, and she means that literally. “I’m the producer of the show,” she says. “We have editing approval.” If she lives in a construct — and who doesn’t? — it’s now one of her own making. To think of her as trapped would be to filter her life through my reality, not hers, and to rob Paris Hilton of her agency. “Now people finally are understanding me, and I just have this respect in a way that I’ve never felt before,” she says. This is real to her. And it feels amazing.