Love, Pamela

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Pamela Anderson’s memoir gives you plenty of celebrity bang for your buck, said Jane Mulkerrins in The Times. The “Baywatch bombshell” tells all about the debauched parties at the Playboy Mansion, and the “OTT Hollywood extravagance” of her 1990s heyday. There’s much “unselfconscious name-dropping of showbiz mates” (Elton John, Vivienne Westwood, Amy Winehouse, even – improbably – Julian Assange). There are the six marriages, notably to the “lairy” Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, with whom she “inadvertently created the first celebrity sex tape”, stolen from their home by a “disgruntled” tradesman. There was nowhere the pair could resist getting intimate (Lee even had her name “inked on his penis”), until he became violent, and Anderson filed for divorce. Although her life has been no bed of roses, there’s no self-pity here. “Men are my downfall,” she concludes. “And I’ve tried all kinds. The common denominator is me.”

Anderson’s memoir is far “stranger and more confounding” than you might expect, said Anna Leszkiewicz in The New Statesman. It began as hundreds of pages of free verse – some of which is included – and she refused the help of a ghostwriter. She writes with “striking emotional clarity” about her childhood: she was born to teenage parents (“hot trouble – the local Bonnie and Clyde”) on Vancouver Island, and her father was violent. She was abused in infancy and gang raped in her teens. Even so, she is determined to “see the best in every situation”, said Julie Burchill in The Spectator. Hers is “a riveting story, excellently told”, and it’s pleasing that a screen beauty, who might once have been “cast aside” at 35, is now still “heard and seen” in middle age. “At last this fascinating woman can be judged as the sum of her parts rather than just as some of her parts.”