Love, Pamela Anderson’s Pamela, Review: An unfiltered memoir strikes back at a life spent as a dirty punchline

When Pamela Anderson first met Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee in a bar in 1994, he greeted her with a lick on the cheek. Instead of taking an antibacterial wipe and sending him away, she asked him to call her. When they first met, Anderson was at a photo shoot in Cancun, Mexico. They went to a club where “Tommy must have added something special to my champagne – the room got foggy.” Anderson was more fascinated than alarmed; Four days later, she and Lee got married.

Anderson’s memoir is full of these wild but disturbing stories. There’s one that’s getting a lot of publicity right now, Tim Allen, Anderson’s co-star. repairwhen he showed her his cock – he told her that it was fair because he had already seen her naked playboy. The other includes actor Jack Nicholson having a threesome in a bathroom at the Playboy Mansion. As Anderson entered and leaned over the sink to fix her makeup, he caught her eye in the mirror. “I think it got him there,” she writes, “because he made a funny sound and smiled and said, ‘Thank you, dear.

Anderson, now 55, has been glorified, objectified and humiliated in various ways for more than three decades. During this time, she got used to grinding her teeth and being silent. But now she’s dealing with her past, like through the autobiographical Netflix series. Pamela love storyand with Dear Pamelaher memories of her tumultuous childhood in Ladysmith, Vancouver Island, being discovered by a scout at a football game, and her fame as playboy model, Malibu safeguards Beauty and a longtime tabloid.

Wanting to show herself as a woman with depth, she writes about her loves for Jung, Rilke, Goethe and Colette and how she uses her fame to raise money for animal welfare and human rights organizations (Anderson was a longtime vegan before it was in vogue). Her writing—wholly her own, since she has given up alcohol—is simple, unfiltered, and, apart from diversions to original poetry, quite decent. Anderson comes across as tough, free-spirited, sensible in her approach to family and, well, maybe not the best character, she claims. playboy Boss Hugh Hefner was a gentleman who casually ignored accusations of abuse from his former employees, and Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, with whom she spent a “playful, fun” evening at the Ecuadorian embassy, ​​is a hero.

She’s not the type to feel sorry for herself, which is impressive given everything she’s been through, from being raped as a young woman to the brutal invasion of privacy that followed a video of her and Lee having sex that was stolen and circulated online. “We never made a sex tape,” she reasonably notes. “We’ve always filmed each other and lived a sexy, passionate life.” However, Anderson’s acting career collapsed along with her marriage, the latter ending in a violent altercation that resulted in Lee being jailed on spousal abuse charges.

Anderson married four more times after Lee; Though each of her marriages has been short-lived, she is oblivious to disappointments. Now she is more interested in her dogs, her garden, reading, walking and watching her two grown sons build their own lives. Like Monica Lewinsky and Britney Spears before her, Anderson is more than a tabloid fantasy figure or a dirty punch line. Dear Pamela offers an alternative portrait of a woman who, despite a difficult start and a culture of misogyny, achieves extraordinary success in life and, after so many years, deserves the final word.