Love, Pamela
(Dey Street, $30)
“The bullet points that make up Pamela Anderson’s life are a matter of public record,” said Zoe Guy in NYMag.com. A Playboy model turned Baywatch star, she was victimized at the height of her 1990s fame by the distribution of a stolen sex tape she made with her first husband, rocker Tommy Lee. Married five more times, “the last reigning blond bombshell” has never disappeared from the public eye. But until now, she had also never written an autobiography without a ghostwriter, said Jane Mulkerrins in The Times (U.K.). Her version of her life story “reliably delivers” the tales of youthful lust and celebrity excess you hope for. The surprise is that she displays a “breezy, gracious acceptance” of all the good and bad that’s befallen her. What’s more, “she can turn a decent phrase, and has a talent for comic underplay.”
“What Love, Pamela does best” is reveal how much Anderson’s sexpot caricature of Anderson “obscured the charms of the real one,” said Ashley Fetters Maloy in The Washington Post. She’s “more wholesomely free-spirited” than you might expect. She’s also more focused on life’s joys than its traumas, even though she reports being sexually abused by a female babysitter, raped at 12, and physically abused by Lee before she left him, taking their two children. She often uses free-verse poetry to convey her inner life and has constructed a personal philosophy from “a curiously wide range of sources,” including Buddhism and Jungian psychoanalysis. At 55, she comes across as “an unassumingly friendly, fun-loving mom,” the kind who takes pleasure in her dogs, sons, and garden.
In short, “her suffering isn’t the most interesting part about her—not even close,” said Audra Heinrichs in Jezebel. Listen and you will learn that Pamela Anderson cultivates interests in radical politics and radical poetry, that she has been a successful international activist for animal rights, and that she’s “so quick-witted” she’s often a step ahead of the same people who try to turn her into a punch line. Sure, she’s a celebrity pinup. But she’s also a “well of wisdom, insatiable reader, indomitable romantic, and born raconteur.”