[BOOK REVIEW]
LOVE, PAMELA
Pamela Anderson (Hachette Australia: Headline) 2023, 240pp, RRP $34.99 (paperback); $55.00 (hardback); $16.99 (e-book); $46.99 (audiobook)
Anderson’s autobiography is very much a setting-the-record-straight effort, and while she has a real voice, her decision to fill her life story with ghastly, unrhyming poetry is a bad mistake. Nevertheless, when she talks of her youth on Vancouver Island, the sometimes-turbulent love between her parents, and how she came to be a Playboy centrefold, she writes with passion and occasional anger. And although she’s almost offhand about being sexually abused by a babysitter, her recollection of being raped at the age of 12 or so is seriously shocking.
She says that her path to Playboy was a surprise but, it must be said, did she ever, ahem, look in a mirror? She also claims that Sylvester Stallone (too old for her even in the late ‘80s) tried to pick her up at the Playboy mansion, and that Tim Allen flashed her during her brief stint on TV’s Home Improvement (he’d seen her naked so supposedly he returned the favour), while some might find it strange that she discusses the late Hugh Hefner with fondness, saying that he treated her with fairness, respect and (believe it or not!) a lack of sleaziness. The international fame she experienced from TV’s Baywatch also, she says, came out of nowhere, and led to plenty of stress and unwelcome attention too. And she looked everywhere for love and, eventually, found it with Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. And we probably all know what came next.
When she tells the truth about the grandaddy of ‘sex tapes’, it’s pretty powerful – and, if you were one of the millions who saw the thing, shaming. She states that a crime was committed against her, and it definitely was, while, in the end, what did the tape really show? Two married people enjoying joyous, consenting lovemaking? Pamela tries too hard to sound clever here (she name-drops authors, poets, politicians, the recently late Vivienne Westwood, and many more) when she doesn’t need to because, as she amply demonstrates, she’s in no way the dumb blonde that so many out there thought she was.
And still do. But, please, Pam: no more poetry!
Dave Bradley
This title is available through the Hachette Australia website. Click HERE to purchase
your copy.
