Prologue

Dr. Edward Hallowell, author of Driven to Distraction, says the ADHD brain is like a Ferrari with bicycle brakes: powerful but difficult to control. My ADHD makes me lose my phone, but it also makes me who I am, so if I’m going to love my life, I have to love my ADHD.

And I do love my life.

It’s June 2022, and I’m having one of my best weeks ever. My friend Christina Aguilera, my neighbor, invited me to be one of her top-secret special guests at LA Pride, and as my crew moved my DJ equipment out the door, I was so nervous and excited I left the house without my shoes and showed up at a backstage trailer in a tank shirt, velour track pants, and socks, which was even more embarrassing when I accidentally went into the wrong dressing room. Some backup dancers were in there getting dressed and screamed for joy when they saw me.

So, selfies. Obviously.

I always try to do it myself—like hold the person’s camera so it’s angled down, which is important if you’re tall, because it’s so unflattering when the angle is up your nostrils or the person’s hands are shaking because they’re maybe nervous and a bit shy, which I totally relate to, so I did that with Loves it! Loves it! Sliving! and all the things, and then off I went in my socks, doing this thing my husband, Carter, calls the unicorn trot: not fully running, more graceful than galloping, and less like skipping than dancing. I have a hard time going slow.

So then I’m there at Pride with Christina and about thirty thousand other people, all decked out in rainbows and sparkles, dancing, laughing, hugging, having the best time during my set, which came right after Kim Petras, who sang at our wedding last year—this beautiful ballad version of Stars Are Blind and then Can’t Help Falling in Love as Carter and I walked down the aisle—which is why that song brought tears to my eyes last week at Britney Spears’s wedding when our gorgeous angel princess bride emerged, after all those nightmare years, and floated down the aisle in Versace (because Versace, please) with that iconic Elvis Presley song, which has been sung at millions of weddings in Vegas, where my grandfather, Barron Hilton, started the whole Vegas residency trend by having Elvis at the Las Vegas Hilton International back in 1969, paving the way for Britney and so many other groundbreaking performers to flourish in that format, a perfect example of how one person’s creative vision sparks a cascade of genius that goes on and on into the future.

Another perfect example: my great-grandfather, Conrad Hilton.

Wait. Where was I?

Pride!

This crowd. Oh, my god. Energy. Love. Light. Unbreakable spirit.

I’m behind the board. It’s like piloting a spaceship full of the coolest people in the galaxy. My set is structured around iconic music like Toxic alongside a sick BeatBreaker remix of Genie in a Bottle by Xtina, Queen of the Night, plus a lot of other dope originals and remixes, which I should put up on the podcast or YouTube, because this set is so much fun. (Note to self: Make playlist for this book.) I was so hyper-focused on my set (note to self: add Ultra Naté to playlist), it didn’t even hit me until I was halfway through that I had left my phone on the counter in that trailer where I took the selfies with the half-dressed backup dancers.

Fuck.

I’m trying not to say fuck all the time. I don’t want to wear it out, because it’s such a good word for so many occasions. Noun. Verb. Job description. Fill in the blank. Fuck saves the day. So fuuuuuuuuuuck! Because I feel naked without my phone, and I’m super paranoid about someone getting hold of it and blasting the contents all over the internet, which has happened more than once, so thank God for Cade—best friend, guardian angel—who went and located the stray phone after I killed my set, and then we all went to the after-party Christina and I hosted at the Soho House downtown.

Now I’m home with my loves: Diamond Baby, Slivington, Crypto, Ether, and Harajuku Bitch, the OG chihuahua.

Shout out to Harajuku Bitch!

She’s twenty-two years old. Multiply that by seven dog years; she’s literally 154! She sleeps twenty-three hours a day and looks like Gizmo from Gremlins, but she’s still here living her best life. I know one night I’ll come home to find she’s fallen asleep forever. I’m so scared of that night, and I hate that random intrusive thought. Intrusive thoughts are my nemesis, cutting through my joy even when I’ve been part of an epic event with people who lift me higher than high and my husband is up in bed waiting patiently for me to take my bath and do my skin-care routine, which he knows I never shortcut.

From the time my sister and I were little girls, our mom instilled in us the value of skin care; I always feel her with me in the soothing ritual. Skin care, if you’re doing it right, means claiming a moment of tenderness in an abrasive world. You remove the mask—your brave face, your funny face, your enforcer face, your hard candy coating—and see yourself, cleansed and replenished, and it’s like, Okay. I’m good. You feel everything so keenly when you’ve just washed your face. Like a newborn feels that first sting of fresh air.

Kim Kardashian and I were making frittata and French toast coated with Frosted Flakes for breakfast one morning, and she said, I don’t know anyone who parties as hard as you do and looks as good as you do.

Skin care. Seriously. If you take nothing else from my story, receive this: Skin care is sacred. Most women who did coke back in the 1990s looked beat by the mid-aughts. That was a strong deterrent for me. I won’t say I never tried it, but I wasn’t about to sacrifice my complexion for it. Same with cigarettes. You may as well hit yourself in the face with a shovel.

These days, my only bad habit is spray-tanning. My sister Nicky can’t stand it, but I’m kind of addicted. Otherwise, Carter and I are big on wellness and skin care. We always say, Forever’s not long enough. Taking care of ourselves is something we do for each other out of love. We want our good life to last.

After I put the frittata in the oven and set a cute little penguin timer, Kim said, "Now is the twelve minutes when we clean. Clean as you go is the rule."

My only rule is skin care. Sunscreen is my eleventh commandment.

You may be wondering: What does all this have to do with ADHD?

Nothing. Also everything. And anything. All at once.

ADHD is exhausting and exhilarating, and it’s how God made me, so it must be right.

Carter doesn’t fully grasp what it means to be ADHD, but he’s the first and only man in my life who made an effort to understand. Early in our relationship, he spent a lot of time and energy researching ADHD, which is the most authentically loving thing any man has ever done for me. Most people sigh, drum their fingers, and let me know how insanely frustrating it is to be sucked into the endless spin cycle of my life. Carter rolls with it. Where most people see a dumpster fire, Carter sees Burning Man. He gets frustrated, for sure, but he’s not trying to deprogram me.

Carter is a venture capitalist. M13, the company he founded with his brother, Courtney, is known for engaging with unicorns—start-ups valued at more than a billion dollars—like Rothy’s, Ring, and Daily Harvest. Carter is a unicorn whisperer. He’s sentimental and forward thinking, and he likes to be the boss, but he has a light touch. If we’re in an 11:11 Media board meeting, talking about a contract, and I go off on a tangent about a better tool for impromptu IG videos and how that tool could be styled, manufactured, and marketed in a really fun, accessible way and I could promote them via cross-promotional content, and what if the nob was like a little otter or sloth or kangaroo—

Carter leans to whisper in my ear. Babe.

Not in a mean way. Just to bring me back to center.

A while back I was featured in The Disruptors, a documentary about extraordinary people with ADHD, including will.i.am, Jillian Michaels, Justin Timberlake, the founders of JetBlue and Ikea, Steve Madden, Simone Biles, Adam Levine, Terry Bradshaw, astronaut Scott Kelly, Channing Tatum—the list goes on and on. The Disruptors also features Dr. Hallowell and other psychologists and neurologists who’ve advanced the science of ADHD. The message of the film really flies in the face of the misconceptions and stigma.

The structure and function of the ADHD brain are a throwback to a time when you had to be a badass to survive, find food, and procreate. (Visual cue: Raquel Welch as the iconic cavewoman queen in One Million Years B.C.) The frontal lobe—home of impulse control, concentration, and inhibition—is smaller, because the primitive badass had to react on instinct, without fear. Neural pathways don’t connect or mature at the same rate, because it was more important for the primitive badass queen to be better at picking berries and killing saber-toothed tigers than she was at reading novels. Dopamine and noradrenaline, powerful chemicals that regulate sleep and facilitate communication between brain cells, were on a slow drip, because she had to wake up at the snap of a twig.

I, like 5 percent of children and 2.5 percent of adults, am a primitive badass in a world of contemporary thinkers, a world that wants obedience and conformity. Even if we wanted to be the orderly people our loved ones want us to be, we don’t have it in us. We must embrace who we are or die trying to be someone else.

The benefits of ADHD include creativity, intuition, resilience, and the ability to brainstorm. I’m good at damage control because I’m constantly losing things, showing up late, and pissing people off. I’m good at multitasking because I’m not hardwired to concentrate on one thing for a big block of time. Because my attention span is limited, I don’t see time as linear; the ADHD brain processes past, present, and future as a Spirograph of interconnected events, which gives me a certain Spidey sense about fashion trends and technology.

It’s easy to follow my bliss because my bliss is whatever interests me at any given moment. My brain chemistry craves sensory input. Sounds, images, puzzles, art, motion, experiences—everything that triggers adrenaline or endorphins—that’s all as necessary as oxygen for the ADHD brain.

I don’t just love fun. I need fun. Fun is my jet fuel.

The primary disadvantage of ADHD is that people around you are often inconvenienced, weirded out, or hurt by your behavior, so you’re constantly getting judged and punished, which makes you feel like shit. Suicidal ideation is higher in people with ADHD. Self-loathing and self-medication are endemic. If the rest of the world says you’re obnoxious or stupid or just not braining right, loving yourself is an act of rebellion, which is beautiful but exhausting, especially when you’re a little kid. With that needy little kid always inside you, your life becomes an epic quest for love—or whatever feels like love in the moment.

I was never medicated as a kid—never tested for ADHD, as far as I know. Even if you have the most wonderful, loving parents in the world (and I do), diagnosis doesn’t always happen early, especially for girls who are good at hiding the symptoms. Treatment of ADHD has traditionally focused on squashing undesirable behavior. In the 1980s, people had just started talking about being hyper or being on the spectrum.

No one ever said, Relax, little girl. There are many different kinds of intelligence.

Instead, people told me I was dumb, bratty, careless, ungrateful, or not applying myself. And none of that was true. I had to be creative and work hard to fit in, but I’m naturally creative and hardworking, so I was in it every day, grinding away, trying to fit in, until I grew strong enough to say, "Fuck fitting in," which is what I intend to teach my children from the beginning, no matter what their neurodevelopmental profile happens to be.

As an adult, I’ve been medication-fluid. When I was in my early twenties, a doctor explained what was wrong with me and put me on Adderall. That was a love/hate relationship that went on for about twenty years—me and Adderall—until Carter and I met with Dr. Hallowell.

Dr. Hallowell said, I’ve been trying to explain to people since 1981 that this condition, if you use it properly, is an asset composed of qualities you can’t buy and can’t teach. It’s stigma that holds us back. Stigma plus ignorance. A lethal combination.

I felt that lightning bolt you feel when someone speaks a hard truth you’ve always known but never heard anyone say out loud.

Our kryptonite is boredom, said Dr. Hallowell. If stimulation doesn’t occur, we create it. We self-medicate with adrenaline.

ADHD can be a wellspring of creative energy, but creative energy’s evil twin is a troublemaking compulsion. Want some adrenaline? Do everything the hard way. Get into train-wreck relationships. There are a million ways to screw yourself over for the sake of adrenaline. My imagination is infinite, but it takes me to dark places as easily as it takes me toward the light. Dr. Hallowell calls it the Demon, that snake that slithers into everything telling you that if it’s bad you deserve it and if it’s good it won’t last. Of course, the Demon is a liar, but try telling that to my brain when it’s craving a big bucket of deep-fried anxiety.

Your greatest asset is your worst enemy, said Dr. Hallowell.

And my brain said, Fuck.

Tell me, Paris, how is your self-esteem?

I’m good at pretending, I said.

He said, That’s common among people who live with ADHD.

Not people who suffer from ADHD. Not people afflicted with ADHD.

People who live with ADHD.

Some of us have discovered that ADHD is our superpower. I wish the A stood for ass-kicking. I wish the Ds stood for dope and drive. I wish the H suggested hell yes.

I’m not bragging or complaining about it, just telling you: This is my brain. It has a lot to do with how this whole book thing is going to play out, because I love run-on sentences—and dashes. And sentence fragments. I’m probably going to jump around a lot while I tell the story.

The Spirograph of time. It’s all connected.

I’ve avoided talking about some of these issues for decades. I’m an issue-avoiding machine. I learned from the best: my parents. Nicky says Mom and Dad are the king and queen of sweeping things under the rug.

There is a hierarchy, and these are the rules in my family:

If you don’t talk about a thing, it’s not a problem.

If you hide how deeply something hurt you, it didn’t happen.

If you pretend not to notice how deeply you hurt someone else, you don’t have to feel bad about it.

Of course, that’s bullshit, and what makes it even crazier: It’s not good business. I come from a family of brilliant businesspeople. How can we be so bad at emotional economics? Relationships, professional and personal, are transactional. Give and take. For better or worse. You invest, hoping for a good return. But there’s always risk.

I love my mom, and I know she loves me. Still, we’ve put each other through hell and can’t squeeze out more than a few words on certain topics. It’s going to be hard for her to read this book. I won’t be surprised if she puts it on a shelf for a while. Or forever. And that’s okay.

I’m trying to take ownership of some intense personal things I’ve never been able to talk about. Things I’ve said and done. Things that have been said and done to me. I have a hard time trusting and don’t easily share my private thoughts. I’m super protective of my family and my brand—the businesswoman who grew out of a party girl and the party girl who still lives inside the businesswoman—so it scares me to think about what a lot of people will say.

But it’s time.

There are so many young women who need to hear this story. I don’t want them to learn from my mistakes; I want them to stop hating themselves for mistakes of their own. I want them to laugh and see that they do have a voice and their own brand of intelligence and, girl, fuck fitting in.

Part 1

Never regret anything, because at one time it was exactly what you wanted.

MARILYN MONROE

1

People told me it was stupid to go skydiving the morning after my twenty-first-birthday party in Las Vegas, but back then, I didn’t care, and now I know they were wrong. If you want to go skydiving the morning after a Level 9 rager, go for it. Your twenty-first birthday is prime real estate for stupid, and a lot of stupid things you do in your twenties lay the foundation for wisdom later on. As you wise up, you realize that all the stupid things you didn’t do—those are the regrets. My twenties were like, damn, girl. Leave no stupid behind. Love the wrong men. Hate the wrong women. Wear the Von Dutch.

I have no regrets.

Okay, I have a few regrets.

Skydiving is not one of them.

When I decided to do it, I was thinking it would be a perfect cherry on top of a star-studded, multicity, balls-out birthday celebration that was lit AF—possibly the greatest twenty-first-birthday celebration since Marie Antoinette—and I can say this with authority because partying is an area of expertise for me, a marketable skill developed over a lifetime of dedicated practice.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY PARTYING LEGACY

(Details to be developed at greater length later in this book.)

The parties I went to when I was tiny were mostly family gatherings at Brooklawn, the home of my dad’s parents, Barron and Marilyn Hilton, whom I called Papa and Nanu. You may have seen this house on my docuseries Paris in Love; it’s the Georgian-style mansion where I got married in 2021. Designed by legendary architect Paul R. Williams—who also created homes for Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, Barbara Stanwyck, and other Hollywood immortals—the house was built for Jay Paley, one of the founders of CBS, in 1935.

At that time, Papa was eight, living in a hotel with his big brother Nicky, baby brother Eric, and my great-grandfather, Conrad Hilton. My great-grandmother had left them (according to family mythology) because she didn’t like the hardworking hotel life and gave up on Conrad ever having real money. (Mentally inserting Bye, Felicia gif.)

Conrad was later briefly married to the Hungarian socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was broke but beautiful and happy to go out dancing every night. Zsa Zsa had a sparkling personality and developed an early version of the business model we now call influencing, getting paid to wear clothes, appear at parties, and talk up beauty products so the brand names would appear in the Hollywood press. The marriage ended bitterly, and Conrad decided it was better to raise the boys himself. He brought them up with old-school Christian values, making them work as bellhops and teaching them that work and family are jealous gods who will always be at war, fighting for a man’s time and complete devotion. Papa married Nanu after World War II, and they had eight kids. Dad is number six. When he was little, they moved into the Jay Paley house and renamed it Brooklawn.

This all sounds like ancient history, but to understand my story, you need to know the Hilton of it all. People who knew Conrad Hilton tell me I’m just like him, and I take that mostly as a compliment. Mostly. He died two years before I was born, and despite what most people think, he left most of his fortune to charity. Papa worked. My parents worked. I’m a working beast. In 2022, I signed a massive deal to be the face of Hilton Hotels in ad campaigns and cross-promotions on my social media, and I love working with them, but I think that’s the biggest money I’ll ever get for being a Hilton.

But I am a Hilton, and that’s huge. Here’s me, acknowledging how blessed and lucky I am, okay? My family has been called American royalty. I’m not downplaying the extraordinary privilege or the access it gave me. Experiences. Travel. Opportunities. I’m grateful for all of it.

The Barron Hilton family is huge, and we flock together, loving each other and minding each other’s business, even though we don’t see each other as much since Nanu died. When we were little, Nicky and I adventured around Brooklawn with our million cousins, climbing fences and playing kickball on the lush green lawn. Parties at Brooklawn were like full-on carnival events, with pony rides, petting zoos, bouncy castles, tennis tournaments, and Marco Polo death matches in the gigantic pool, which featured an elaborate mosaic—imported Italian tile depicting the signs of the zodiac. I’m an Aquarius, so I thought I should be the one that looked kind of like a mermaid, but that turned out to be Virgo. Aquarius was a beefy-looking dude with a jug of water on his shoulder. I probably cried when I found that out. Actually, I probably cried for three seconds and then decided I was the mermaid, no matter what the stars or some old Italian tile people said.

My parents, Rick and Kathy Hilton, spent the 1970s partying with Andy Warhol and the hippest possible crowds from Studio City to Studio 54. My dad is in real estate and finance, the cofounder of Hilton & Hyland, a massive firm specializing in high-level corporate and residential real estate. My parents did a lot of entertaining related to his business, and when Mom has a party, she plans it down to the last rose petal, all the little things that make her guests feel like they’re part of something special. Everything is perfect, including the hostess. My mom styles herself and her surroundings with impeccable taste. She walks into a party and works that room like a royal—savvy, kind, and beautiful. People love her, because she genuinely cares about people, listens to them, and lets them feel savvy, kind, and beautiful, too.

True sophistication is the ability to fit in anywhere because you have a broad understanding of and respect for all kinds of people. Mom is sophisticated like that. She’s funny and smart and stylish, but savvy is her real superpower. I had no clue how much silly energy she had bottled up inside her until she signed on to do The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in 2021. It was like somebody popped a cork on a bottle of pink champagne.

When Nicky and I were little, before the boys came along, Mom schooled us on party manners. Which fork to use. How to place our feet when we stood for red carpet photos. We understood that our family name carried weight and drew attention. We had a certain place in society, which came with certain expectations. As little girls, Nicky and I attended super chic social functions, fundraising events, holiday galas, and fancy receptions at the Waldorf or the Met, where my parents mixed with lawyers, agents, politicos, and all kinds of extraordinary people who did big things.

One of my earliest memories is sitting on Andy Warhol’s lap, drawing pictures at an after-party at the Waldorf-Astoria. He loved me and always told my mom, This kid is going to be a huge star.

I love that my parents included us in all that. You might think fancy business and social events would be boring for a little kid, but I lived for those parties. I learned to appreciate the architecture of a good ball gown. I was exposed to great music: jazz combos, string quartets, and private performances by famous artists. I sat like a butterfly on a fence, eavesdropping on adult conversations about corporate maneuvers, real estate deals, fortunes being made and lost, ill-advised love affairs, and messy divorces. It was all about love and money, two things that fascinated me because everyone seemed to be under the spell of one or the other.

The first time I experienced going to a club environment, I was twelve. Nicky and I were friends with Pia Zadora’s daughter Kady, and Pia was friends with our mom, so we got to go with Pia to a New Kids on the Block concert in LA. Because Pia was a celebrity, we got to go backstage—and we were, like, dying.

We’re going to Bar One for the after-party, the boys told Pia. You should come.

Nicky and Kady and I were like, "We have to go! Please! Pleeeeeeeease!" We were all totally obsessed with New Kids. Pia was cool, so we went over to Bar One, and the bouncers let her right in because celebrity.

The atmosphere inside Bar One blew my tiny mind. I had an immediate visceral response like yaaassssss because—LIGHTS MUSIC LAUGHTER FASHION MUSIC JOY LIGHTS WHITE TEETH DIAMONDS MUSIC—a blast of the flashy sensory input my ADHD brain constantly craved. I didn’t know I was feeling an actual shift in my body chemistry, but I knew I was feeling something real, and I loved it. Every part of me came alive—body, brain, skin, spirit—and it felt awesome.

Unfortunately, just as I was soaking all this in, we bumped into my mom’s sister. Aunt Kyle was like, WTF! She dragged Pia aside for a brief, hissy conversation and then took us home, but I knew I had to go back.

In my early teens, I took advantage of every sneak-out opportunity I could create. I became one of those Desperately Seeking Susan club kids who ruled the nighttime world in the early nineties. The vogue dancers and drag queens took me under their wings and watched out for me, which is how I learned the key elements of partying like a rock star:

Stay hydrated.

Stay pretty (tipsy can be cute, but drunk is gross).

Wear boots—like good, sturdy platform boots—and comfortable clothes so you can dance all night and easily climb in and/or out of windows and over fences as needed.

I didn’t drink or do drugs back then. When I was a kid, fun was the only party drug I needed. I wasn’t there to get wasted; I was there to dance. Alcohol and drugs are for escaping reality, and I wanted all the reality I could get. The escape drinking didn’t happen until later.

One night after the Pia Zadora club adventure, I tried to smuggle Nicky, our cousin Farrah, and our friend Khloé Kardashian into Bar One. Khloé and Farrah were little middle school girls, so I did Khloé up with full makeup, a long red wig, and a floppy black hat.

I told her, If anyone asks, your name is Betsey Johnson.

I put Farrah on top of somebody’s shoulders with a big trench coat. We put so much effort into our disguises, we were shocked when we didn’t get past the velvet rope.

I guess you need to be with someone famous, I said.

I didn’t like how it felt to be rejected in front of everyone. I wasn’t going to let it happen again. When I was sixteen, I hooked up fake IDs for Nicky and me. We weren’t fooling anyone, but we were getting a little bit famous, so we had no trouble getting in Bar One (now Bootsy Bellows), Roxbury (now Pink Taco), and other hot spots.

My partying opportunities between the ages of sixteen and eighteen were limited, because I was locked up in a series of culty wilderness boot camps and emotional-growth boarding schools. When I escaped for a few blessed weeks of freedom, I played it safe with small beach parties and living room gatherings where kids were just chilling and talking, until I made everyone get up and dance. Especially kids who were too shy or felt self-conscious about their bodies. They’re the ones who need dancing most. This is still the rule at every gig I DJ in my virtual world or in real life: When you party with Paris, you dance.

At eighteen, I signed with a modeling agency, and what do you think people want to do after a runway show? Party with models. It’s easy to think no duh, but move past the easy assumption that men are pigs and models are dumb. That’s not fair or true or useful. Most men are basically decent, I think, and successful models travel all over the world. Traveling the world is the best education there is. Most models are in their teens and twenties, and sometimes that lack of maturity shows, but they’re growing. Give them a minute.

Networking—knowing how to work a party—is a critical aspect of growing a business. In my twenties, I was so good at both partying and business, people started paying me to come to their parties. I didn’t invent getting paid to party, but I reinvented it. I’m proud to be called the OG influencer. Girls need to understand the value they bring to the party. It’s a lot more than standing around looking pretty. Mannequins can do that. An accomplished party girl is a facilitator, a negotiator, a diplomat—she’s the sparkler and the match.

Know your worth, girls. You’re not lucky to be at the party; the party is lucky to have you. Apply as needed to relationships, jobs, and family.

Like my wedding in 2021, my twenty-first-birthday celebration in 2002 spanned multiple days and time zones. I’d already been partying in clubs for years, but I was sick of bullshitting bouncers, passing off fake IDs—as if they didn’t know. It made pretenders of us all, and that seems like such a waste of energy. I was excited to be twenty-one and leave all that behind. This was my first time to go out all nice and legal, so I went big, planning parties all over the world and getting sponsors to pay for it all. My coming-of-age birthday bash was a dancing, drinking, hobnobbing