Sarah Laudenbach's Reviews > Love, Pamela

"Playboy was an honor and a privilege, I never thought of it as immoral or salacious but the unforeseen downside was that it may have set me up. It was my choice, I accepted by fate. It gave some the impetus, sadly, to treat me without respect."

Love, Pamela was such a lovely surprise. I didn't really grow up as a fan of Pamela Anderson, by virtue that I was a child at the height of her fame, and I really hadn't even known much about the 'tape,' or her modelling career, or her activism. What inspired me to read this book was, ironically, Pam and Tommy, a series that I know Anderson rightfully hates, but offered a really good primer on some genuinely interesting issues surrounding female celebrity, sexuality, and (ironically, considering Anderson's issues with the show) consent.

I think what I loved most about Love, Pamela is that it is well and truly a personal autobiography. Anderson says as much in her acknowledgements that this wasn't ghostwritten or written in collaboration with anyone - this is just her story, her life, her memories, formatted how she wants it to be formatted. Some reviewers didn't like the even mix of poetry and prose, and considering that I'm really not much of a poetry person, I was surprised to find how big of a difference Anderson including her poetry so often in Love, Pamela made. Honestly, I think more autobiographies should be written exactly like this: in a way that best conveys the story a person is trying to tell, rather than trying to follow a strictly historical, chronological chronicling of a life.

Anderson even says that "there is no woe-is-me in this book. It is a celebration, a scrapbook of imperfect people living imperfect lives and finding the joy in that." It was so refreshing that Anderson felt that this book was her opportunity to tell her side of the story, the good and the bad, but admitting that for every terrible experience she went through, she gained something from it. Whether it was experience, or knowledge, or self-understanding, she doesn't portray herself to be any kind of a victim, because as Anderson writes, she's tired of being the victim. She's tired of being sexualized and infantilized and treated as though she isn't a grown woman.

That being said, I think my one gripe with this book is one that can be said for most autobiographies: nobody is the bad guy in their own story, and half of most autobiographies are spent with celebrities trying to convince readers of how amazing of people they are. Particularly when it comes to celebrity autobiographies post-scandal that seek to set the record straight (Pamela Anderson, Prince Harry, etc.) There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to show a different, perhaps more (perhaps less) authentic side to yourself, but at some point, it begins to feel preachy. I loved learning about Anderson's charity work and about her love of classic art and literature, but somewhere along the way it just began to read like a bad Tinder bio (Hobbies: Helping other people. Interests: Plato, Khalo, Warhol. Spend all of my free time reading philosophy and saving the environment. Go vegan, free Julian Assange.).

Still, I think it's admirable that Anderson admits you can never truly know a person until you've spent a lifetime with them, and so even the most hardcore Pamela Anderson fans or detractors have no idea what she's really like. Watching a scathing documentary or reading her autobiography will still never even come close to telling you what she's really like, but I think that's the point she's trying to make: she doesn't need people to be absolutely in love with her and think she's never done anything wrong, but she needs to prove that she's more than the hot girl with the big boobs whose 'sex tape' was leaked. It's important for her to prove she's more than that, because as Pam and Tommy proved last year, that legacy isn't going anywhere. She can't change it, but she can add positively to it, the same way I think she's tried to do with her charity work, but that's totally just personal opinion.

This wasn't the most heavy read in the world, and it really was a nice, wholesome, inspiring read. I really loved hearing Anderson talk about her life as a mother and how much she loves her kids more than anything else, and I really do hope this book changes her public narrative a little. It's not a book you need to commit serious time or emotional space into, and it's a really rewarding read.