Pamela Anderson's blond bombshell image was ubiquitous in the 1990s. Discovered in the stands of a football game, she was immediately rocket launched into fame, becoming Playboy's favorite cover girl and an emblem of Hollywood glamour and sexuality. But what happens when you lose grip on your own life—and the image the notoriety machine creates for you is not who you really are?
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.
