Lauren Conrad was on The View yesterday to talk about L.A. Candy, the book she wrote.  Or as Beet likes to say, the book she “wrote.” 

Either way, in a manner that was so inappropriately solemn and grave, Lauren admitted (at about 0:47 on the clip) that The Hills is totally faked.  I just wanted to scream, “Lauren!  It’s not like you’re confessing that you figured out how to split the atom.  You didn’t unearth the mystery of the pyramids.  This is The Hills we’re talking about!”

Woah. Lauren Conrad’s life just got way too meta for me.

If you hadn’t heard by now, Lauren Conrad somehow got a book deal before me. Her debut novel is called L.A. Candy, and it’s “the behind-the scenes story of a young girl who moves to L.A. and unexpectedly becomes the star of a reality television show.” So, ya know, it’s the story of Lauren’s life on Laguna Beach and The Hills.

Now here’s where it gets really weird: Lauren wants to turn the book into a TV show.

“It’s one of my hopes,” said LC, who will hold court tonight at her book party at the Thompson Hotel in Beverly Hills. “We’re going to start working on [adapting it for TV] when I get back from my book tour.”

Ummmmm am I the only person who sees the insanity here? This is like watching a TV in a TV in a TV in a TV. You can’t make a TV show about a young girl who unexpectedly finds herself the star of a reality TV show — because that is the reality TV show. That is the entire premise of The Hills. You may as well have just stayed on The Hills, Lauren. OMG. Help! Brain exploding! I’m stuck in the infinite loop of Lauren Conrad’s career and I can’t get out!

“What they didn’t get is that I didn’t want to fight with her anymore. It’s hard to look at somebody who used to be your best friend and say, ‘We can’t be friends. Too much has happened.’ I’m trying to move on, but they won’t let me. And when someone keeps pushing you into the same position well … you get upset.”

That’s Lauren Conrad, in the July issue of Cosmopolitan, discussing how The Hills producers pressured her to make up with ex-BFF Heidi Montag. Lauren has since quit her gig on the show. “I’ve always had another season to look forward to, but now life is a little more unplanned,” she says. “It’s really exciting.”

She’s all settled in with her real-life boyfriend, Kyle Howard. “I feel sexiest with him when I’m in sweatpants and no make-up,” she says.

Ya know what? I want to give big, big props to Lauren. She’s really done what every celebrity talks about doing but never actually does: She walked away from it all. I mean, granted, she’s still on the cover of Cosmo, but she really, truly stood up and said “I don’t want the cameras following me any more. I’m over it. I’m leaving.” That’s a hard thing to do, to walk away from the spotlight, to ask to live a life just like anyone else’s, especially when your arch-enemies — people like Heidi & Spencer and Kristin Cavallari — are happy to step into the spot you left behind. What Lauren did took a lot of strength and courage. I just think she deserves to be commended on that.

To check out an excerpt from Lauren’s fascinating and brilliant first novel, l.a. candy, which she definitely wrote all by herself, click here.

Lauren Conrad may be done filming The Hills, but she’s not ready to leave TV entirely. She just filmed a guest spot for Family Guy — playing herself, per usual, except this time it turns out she’s a genius! Hey, at least she’s not pulling an Audrina and trying to get into acting or pulling a Heidi and releasing crappy singles — LC knows what she’s good at, and she’s stickin’ to that. There’s some credit due there.

Lauren says of her Guy gig, “The idea in the episode is that they make fun of me for being dumb and then discover that I’m actually a genius, and that [Lauren Conrad is] kind of a character I play [on TV], because America likes dumb people.”

And how did L.C. handle the challenges of playing a cartoon genius?

She says, “I hired an acting coach just for the day because a lot of the lines later on in the episode are very complicated. I’m talking a lot about history and theorems and conductors, and there’s a lot of facts and a lot of big words, and I had to say it as if it was coming to me very easily, so I had to learn the lines ahead of time rather than just reading them. I actually had to research some of them because the acting coach told me that if I really understood what I was talking about, it would come through a little more true.”

What do you think, America? Do you like dumb people?

Lauren’s episode will air May 3.

So LC was paid a shitload of cash to “write” a “novel,” and here’s your first look at the cover art for L.A. Candy.

Wanna hear about the “plot”?

Conrad’s publishing debut is a fictional story about a 19-year-old girl named Jane Roberts who has not-so-subtle similarities to the author.

“Roberts can’t wait to start living it up,” the official book synopsis says. “She may be in L.A. for an internship, but Jane plans to play as hard as she works and has enlisted her BFF Scarlett to join in the fun.”

In the novel, the two main characters are approached by a producer who wants them to be on a reality version of Sexy [sic?] and the City.

The book is about “what it’s like to come of age in Hollywood while starring in a reality TV show, written by a girl who has experienced it all firsthand,” the synopsis says.

Yeah I’m sure Lauren wrote every damn word of this herself.

Coming soon: My “novel” about a fictional character named Shnevil Tweet who writes a celebrity gossip “plog” and is very jealous of the star of a reality TV show called The Lumps because there are lots of very talented writers out there dying to get a publishing deal and this girl lands one just by getting drunk and accusing all her best friends of betraying her for six years straight.

Yesterday, I was watching the new Hills trailer with Film.com’s incomparable TV editor and my fellow reality TV junkie, Pamela Sitt. “I think this is the last season,” said Pamela, as we both stared, gaping, at the footage of Lauren and Heidi crying and hugging and Spencer getting into a bar fight. “It feels like they’re winding down.”

“I imagine they are,” I told her. “I can’t believe Lauren Conrad’s willing to do this shit much longer.”

And now we have confirmation — this will be the last season of The Hills. Lauren is calling it quits, she tells Seventeen magazine in a recent interview. “My biggest thing with the show was that I wanted to walk away from it while it’s still a great thing,” she explains. “I always want to remember it that way. I gave MTV a deadline and said, ‘This is as long as I can do it and stay sane.’”

Good for LC! She always did have a good head on her shoulders, that girl. But Lauren’s been on our television sets since she was 17 — is she really ready to walk away from all that? Or will she find a way to show up every week on Spencer and Heidi’s inevitable spinoff, The Assholes?