Dream Facades – Jack Balderrama Morley

“The only thing Heidi does is read and write poetry and pray and read books,” Spencer tells their friend, Kristin Cavallari. “I don’t let her go on TV, no computers.” Spencer becomes seemingly paranoid and erratic, obsessed with the healing power of crystals to the point that his friends begin to find him odd. “These people don’t know how [bleeped] dangerous I am,” he says at a nightclub, where he shows up emotional and gets in a fight with his friends.

Heidi stands by her man. “Spencer didn’t change me,” she tells Cavallari. “I changed myself.” Heidi is the empowered frontier woman, setting off from her parents’ Colorado lodge to reinvent everything about herself out west with a wild man. For this, she was the villain. Eventually Heidi’s sister, Holly, gathers with the other women on the show, and they mourn Heidi’s transformation and decide to cut the couple off. “So, we’ll just stop talking about them, all of us,” Stephanie Pratt, Spencer’s sister, says.

Holly delivers the closing remarks. “I just feel like she’s gone forever,” she says before sobbing. Since the beginning of The Hills, Heidi was the foil to Lauren Conrad. Like Becky Sharp, the willful, wicked lead of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Heidi rolled her eyes at her dutiful counterpart. The show starts with Lauren and Heidi enrolling at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, and Heidi skips class on her first day.

She’d much rather get into the working world immediately and scores her dream job at a public relations and event planning company, but she’s soon bored of that, too, glumly staring at her work computer calendar showing “9:00 a.m.: Start work, 6:00 p.m.: Finish work” repeated endlessly. Heidi is unlike Lauren, who strives for Teen Vogue internships in Paris and New York, and even less like Lauren’s intern rival, Emily Weiss, who would go on to found the billion-dollar beauty brand Glossier and become an emblem of girlboss feminism.

Heidi was bound for something different. While on The Hills, she landed magazine covers and released music. She and Spencer published a book, How to Be Famous: Our Guide to Looking the Part, Playing the Press, and Becoming a Tabloid Fixture, with a cover mimicking a celebrity gossip magazine. They appeared on the second season of the Survivor- esque reality series I’m a Celebrity …

Get Me Out of Here!

Copyright © 2026 by Jack Balderrama Morley All rights reserved. Copying or digitizing this book for storage, display, or distribution in any other medium is strictly prohibited. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, please contact [email protected]. Astra House A Division of Astra Publishing House astrahouse.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request. ISBN: 978-1-6626-0292-4 First edition Design by Alissa Theodor OceanofPDF.com For my parents, who let me watch so much TV OceanofPDF.com CONTENTS Begin Reading Acknowledgments About the Author OceanofPDF.com W hen I was young, I saw something that changed my life: a twentysomething woman and her best friend moving into a condo complex supposedly in West Hollywood, California.

Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag were starting a glossy new life together in the Hillside Villas, a Spanish Colonial Revival–style development. Conrad and Montag would meet a new friend by the pool, bring boyfriends home, and celebrate after landing jobs in creative industries, Montag in PR and Conrad at Teen Vogue. Conrad would leave in her BMW convertible to spend a seemingly unending amount of money brunching at various restaurants and partying at celebrity hot spot Les Deux. At the end of the first season, she would temporarily move with her boyfriend into a Malibu beach house with a wall of windows overlooking the Pacific.

This, I thought from my parents’ couch in frigid Poughkeepsie, New York, was real living. This, I thought, was just what I needed. This was The Hills. In retrospect, what I really needed was SSRIs and a broader worldview, but I was years away from both. So sitting there, stuffing my face with DOTS, my candy of choice, I decided: Los Angeles!

If I could move to Los Angeles after graduation, life would really begin. The glittering life on- screen felt more real than the gray one around me. MTV’s hit had sucked me in. I did move to LA, but my life didn’t turn out exactly like it had for the ladies on-screen. For better or worse, I’m not a wealthy white woman from Laguna Beach, my beat-up Honda Civic was no BMW, and my apartment did not have an ocean view.

Real life wasn’t like reality TV, it turned out. Unlike Conrad and company, I didn’t find a glittering life in California, and after a couple of years, I left. But I wasn’t so easily robbed of my naivety. Over the years, I’ve fallen for plenty of other reality TV homes: I nursed heartbreak alongside Shereé Whitfield while she built her chateau on The Real Housewives of Atlanta, felt some sense of superiority leering at the glossy Selling Sunset mansions during the first savvy-villain-supreme Trump presidency, and found what felt like friends amid the laughter and tears of the Love Island villa during pandemic lockdowns.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: dcb7041df1bb3dd0
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 4,223,148 bytes (4.028 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781662602924
• Pages: 187
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 348.74 minutes
• Total Words: 69,748
• Total Characters: 421,207
• Average Words per Page: 372.98
• Average Characters per Page: 2252.44

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