The most disappointing thing about Love, Pamela is that it doesn’t come in a form that can be injected directly into your veins ... Anderson is a natural storyteller, which shouldn’t come as a surprise; her ability to sustain a personal narrative is what’s kept her in the public eye for going on four decades. Love, Pamela is a dazzling and occasionally dizzying ride through this period, in which vivid scenes of ’80s and ’90s decadence bump up against blind items about Russian oligarchs and brief but iconic celebrity cameos ... Woven throughout are passages written in verse, which is not as annoying as it sounds: There’s so much going on that you need the extra line breaks to catch your breath.
The explosion of a deeply held cultural myth ... Reading and watching her own version of her life illuminates not just her own story, but the often hideous cultural hypocrisy at work in all forms of the entertainment industry and the media surrounding it ... In place of bitterness, we get the joys of motherhood; the solace and enlightenment of voracious reading ... Pamela Anderson has many interests, but dwelling on the past is not one of them. She will face it, yes, but she will not dwell. This is a rare quality worthy of admiration even if, despite the double-platform memoir, it leaves you with a limited understanding of who she is.
A wild ride traversing terrain around the star most of us have never accessed ... The book blends prose and poetry, pairing simple clipped verse with impressive philosophical references—an often-overlooked fact about Anderson is that she is a voracious reader—in an intimate look at the underside of a blond bombshell Anderson explains as a construct, and one she increasingly controls for her own activist ends. The mix of prose and poetry creates an impressionist experience ... Her memoir asks us to look beyond the centerfold spread, sex tape, and platinum hair to her politically active, emotionally fragile, and intellectually hungry world ... Anderson is at her most anchored and palpable probing the inner sanctums of her life, and Love, Pamela is a defiant and loud testament to that.
Certainly, she’s smarter and more thoughtful than the person many late-night hosts of the 1990s thought they were talking to, though admittedly that’s a low bar to clear. But what Love, Pamela does best is lay bare the fact that the sexpot caricature of Anderson — the mythic, crushingly larger-than-life idea of her — obscured the charms of the real one ... It is abundantly clear, though, that while Anderson wants to complicate her image as a dumb-blonde sex symbol, she wants to wholesale reject any portrayal of her as a tragic figure ... Love, Pamela invites audiences to do what might have simply been too tall an order earlier in Anderson’s colorful, eventful life: to laugh with her, not at her. To learn from her as something other than a cautionary tale. To be happy for her.
When the subject of Pamela Anderson comes up, understatement likely isn’t the first word that comes to mind. And yet, as her entirely self-authored memoir, Love, Pamela, makes clear, it is actually her preternatural calling. She can virtually murder a man with a simple declarative sentence ... In... Love, Pamela... Anderson describes her life instead with the measured acceptance of someone who long ago admitted defeat ... There is a thesis in her book, if an accidental one. Anderson narrates rather than analyzes the events of her life as a model and an actor, and the heft of it emerges between the lines: a devastating portrait of what it’s like to be a person who—almost arbitrarily—drives men wild.
With Love, Pamela Anderson reliably delivers. There is unselfconscious name-dropping of showbiz mates — Elton John, Eminem, Vivienne Westwood, Amy Winehouse — and outlandish, OTT Hollywood extravagance ... 'Reclaiming the narrative' has become a bit of a tiring trope...but Love, Pamela grinds no axe, seeks to settle no scores and apportions no blame ... But Anderson’s breezy, gracious acceptance isn’t the book’s only surprise. She wrote it herself ... And she can turn a decent, if somewhat whimsical phrase.
The iconic Anderson uses a mixture of poetry and prose to present an impressionistic view of a fascinating life ... There are still some surprises, despite a life lived in the public eye, and the book paints a picture of a wild spirit, a proud mother, and a seeker that will draw in fans and those who have misunderstood this complicated woman.
Anderson fully takes control of her own story, addressing the salacious aspects but also sharing inspiring tales of survival, motherhood, and activism.
Epic highs and lows alike are muted in this contemplative memoir by Anderson’s resolute acceptance of things as they are, rather than the way she might like them to be. Would-be villains are reduced to their actions rather than the motivations one might project onto them; irredeemable acts reflect more on the cruelty of the world than the inhumanity of their perpetrators. This same lens is turned on those Anderson loves: even when they commit violence against her or others, accountability never quite slips into condemnation ... That’s a shame, because Love, Pamela is at its most engaging when we see Anderson at her most human ... In Love, Pamela, whatever conclusions she’s drawn are kept in a black box, as if the way she feels is simply beside the point. These things happened — isn’t that enough? This reticence can be frustrating, especially as Anderson enters adulthood ... The brightest spots in her prose appear when the poetic images leap onto the page from the real world ... Love, Pamela feels like... sitting in a white Adirondack chair facing the ocean while someone tells you the story of their extraordinary life as if it happened to a stranger. As if it could have happened to anyone.
Throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly ... A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
