In her recent Q&A with us, Playboy Club model and disability advocate Viola Odette Harlow shared her unusual life story with us: being homeschooled, life as a child actor, and battling both lupus and heart disease. Despite challenging circumstances, the through line of it all was one of hope.

Now Viola hopes to share her experiences with others who may need to hear them with two new creative ventures: a new album, Porn Star, and her forthcoming book, No One Famous Has It Yet. In a talk with Playboy, Viola shares her inspiration for the two projects and why both are rich with messages that are more important to put out into the world now, more than ever before.

Viola Odette Harlow on ‘Porn Star’

When it comes to the inspiration around the album and its key themes, Viola tells Playboy it contains several key themes of her life experiences.

“It’s a pretty cohesive story from the last couple years about being in the entertainment industry, about being chronically ill, about feeling very misunderstood, and about how many people there are like that and how disconnected we are from each other,” she said.

Viola also mentions that some inspiration came from something she read in a book from Korean-American autor Joanna Hedva.

“She said it’s really strange that disability and chronic illness aren’t really in art the way that love, romance, war, and things are even though they are just as regular and prevalent in society as those things,” Viola said. “She’s got a point. I remember when Halsey released a song about her illness. For me it was a really powerful song and I was so grateful that another artist released a song that I could just listen to over and over again and when I felt alone. I felt less alone because of it. And I thought, can I make something that makes people feel less alone?”

Viola also tells Playboy that the album is a discussion about being sick, and also being sick in a lower class.

“[It talks about] the lower class ways of making ends meet, whether they be GoFundMe, OnlyFans, Centerfold, and now our country’s looking to criminalize this,” she says.

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The cover image, depicting Viola having her mug shot taken while holding a board that says ‘porn star,’ is based on the implications of President-elect Trump’s Project 2025, which threatens to ban pornography and criminalize sex work.

“I want the cover to make people be like, what does that mean?” Viola says. “We needed to call it Porn Star. I want to start a conversation about this so people feel less alone.”

The first single from the album, Scorsese, is now available on YouTube, Apple Music, and Spotify. Porn Star debuts February 27, 2025.

‘No One Famous Has It Yet’

While Porn Star wraps Viola’s life experiences in a package you can dance to, she describes her book No One Famous Has It Yet, which comes out March 31, 2025, as its darker counterpart.

“The quote I have at the beginning of the book is ‘some stories aren’t meant to be sung.'” There’s some things I’ve written that aren’t something to put a guitar part to,” she tells Playboy. “This is just something to sit with and breathe through and then let go of.”

The book’s title is mentioned in one of its poems, which appears exclusively here in Playboy and can be read below.

No One Famous Has It Yet

I knew my nervous system was broken
I knew my thyroid wanted to lose
Me at stop light, and find a host that was right
I wish it would take me too

But, I never pictured artery lining
Was it soft like silk or patterned like a snake
Today I was told it was winding
And coiling shut, there must be some mistake

I am a young woman, with bows in my hair
Mary Janes on my feet or off with him there
Or her I wasn’t ready to make plans
Or take nitroglycerin for a heart attack

Now I shop Hollywood Forever
Not Forever 21, The Judy corridor
I think I’d like a drawer better
I like that crypts are above the floor

Now back to where I am sitting
In a hospital gown staring at a man
Who said that I had Prinzmetal
I asked him was that a disease or a band?

I know I’ve got a bad nervous system
I’m as inflamed as the author Colette
But, when I asked about cures for Prinzmetal
He said, “No one famous has it yet”

“I really hope that the right people find it and that they can just have it because when I found books like that, I just hold them [like] they’re a Bible,” Viola said. “I hope that the stories and the poems are things you can give yourself, a mantra that you need that day.”

No One Famous Has It Yet is published by Dream Boy Book Club and will be available everywhere books are sold on March 31, 2025.

Viola Odette Harlow is on The Playboy Club. Talk to her now.