Book Review: Love, Pamela

 

Love, Pamela is a 2023 memoir written by actress and model Pamela Anderson. It started as a book of poetry and turned into a memoir in which she talks about her evolution from a shy tomboy to the most famous pinup girl of the 1990s, who was the most popular character on the most watched show of the 1990s. In it, she details her life growing up in small Canadian towns, her discovery at a football game, which led to the start of her modeling career and led to her becoming the most famous Playboy Playmate in history, breaking into acting, and her complicated (and often messy) personal life that was constantly bombarded by paparazzi. 

The hardcover version of the book is relatively short at 240 pages and is a fairly quick read. Anderson does not hold a lot back in the book. She focuses on the behind-the-scenes aspects of her personal life more than her acting career (e.g., her time on Baywatch). Not that she does not discuss things people mostly know about, but she focuses more on things that were more private before she wrote this book. She talks about her tough childhood, growing up in a home with an alcoholic father, being molested by a babysitter, and later raped by a kid in her neighborhood. Interestingly, her experience with Playboy seems much different than what other Playmates and models have detailed. She recounted how it saved her from an abusive relationship and that everyone was professional to her. She did discuss how she avoided situations that could have turned out bad when doing Playboy press tours. That is actually interesting because she seems to be very impulsive (e.g., marrying people she barely knew) and certainly did not always make great decisions in her past. She does talk about people she hooked up with, dated, and gave some behind-the-curtain information on her marriages (especially to Tommy Lee) and the craziness behind the theft of their safe with the videos that would be used to create the infamous sex tape. At the end of the book, she discusses her life as a mother and trying to raise her kids outside the celebrity limelight. 

Ultimately, the book is an interesting read. Even though it is short, she discusses a lot about her life, and you can tell that she is not the dumb blonde that her acting roles would suggest. She laments in the book about how the modeling and the people she was hanging around with precluded her from getting more serious acting roles, but then says she was not really focused on being an actress. It is not what I would call a must-read book, but if you grew up when she was massively popular, it is worth reading.