We’ve Gotten it Wrong: On Celebrity Memoirs

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That we have gotten it wrong about women is, at this point, a culturally accepted truth. The feminist project is not a monolith, but a unifying thread is a pushing back against dominant narratives that define who women are, what they’re capable of, and where they do and do not belong. The counter-narrative is a key tool of resistance—it turned Freud’s conception of hysteria into a critique of the patriarchal conditions that drove women to madness; it turned rumors about sluts into survival-gossip about harmful men; it turned racist comments about Black women’s anger into movements revealing everything they had to be angry about. Counter-narratives helped us understand that we were wrong about Monica Lewinsky, Tonya Harding, and Lorena Bobbitt. They fueled the #TimesUp and #MeToo movements, the former founded by Tarana Burke to amplify the voices of women and people of color experiencing harm at the workplace, the latter first made popular by famous acctresses speaking out about sexual assault in Hollywood. 

Critical celebrity scholar and journalist Anne Helen Petersen argues in Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman that “celebrities are our most visible and binding embodiments of ideology at work.” We learn a lot about our cultural values through media coverage of famous people, the movies they’re in, the songs they sing. We can also learn a lot by listening to what they tell us is happening behind the scenes, especially when they’re on a mission to right the perceptions of a culture that has wronged them. 

It is here where we can situate some of 2023’s most talked about memoirs: Pamela Anderson’s Love, Pamela: A Memoir of Prose, Poetry and Truth (Dey Street Books); Julia Fox’s Down the Drain (Simon & Schuster); and Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me (Gallery Books). Anderson and Spears are both illustrative of the horrific treatment women experienced in ’90s and early-00s pop culture media, while Fox is an example of someone who grew up on that media and has experienced a newer iteration of fame. Despite being from slightly different generations, different entertainment fields, and in various places on the celebrity spectrum, the women  have a lot in common. Anderson, Spears, and Fox are all from white, low-income families. Their careers have been coupled with explicit attention to their sexuality. They are all currently single mothers. They are all, in part, famous for their relationships to famous men. All of them have been terribly heartbroken and harmed. All three write (or in Spears’ case, talk to a ghostwriter) with a kind of empathy and specificity that, to me, provides a necessary addition to the feminist canon. 

Of the three, Pamela Anderson’s prose is the most skillful and interestingly crafted. She did not have a ghostwriter. I have no trouble believing this because what Anderson wrote, ultimately, could be included in the growing ‘autotheory’ canon. Anderson is a reader—from Joseph Campbell, Anaïs Nin, and Ché Guevera to Pablo Neruda—and it informs how she understands her life. She tells a relatively linear story, sprinkled intermittently with more abstract poetry, about her experience as a young girl growing up on Vancouver island in the Pacific Northwest. Anderson writes: 

was formed by a volcano 150 million years ago, and First Nations people lived there thousands of years before Columbus set foot on the island. You can’t ‘discover’ a land where people already live in. History is often rewritten to create heroes out of monsters. Or vice versa. The truth always comes to the surface, eventually.

The purpose of including this history to begin the story of where she grew up is two-fold: first, it becomes a method, early in the book, of revealing Anderson’s left-leaning (though somewhat incoherent) politics. Second, it sets up a parallel to her own rewriting of history. It is bold and problematic to use a history of colonization as a bridge to reclaim her narrative as an inarguably aggrieved white woman. But it’s also messy, and allows us to ask questions about the role of land acknowledgments, and the role of celebrities using (or not using) their platform to engage social issues. 

Anderson grew up poor with a young mother and father who loved (and love) each other fiercely but, together, had a toxic-to-abusive dynamic. She was sexually molested by her female babysitter in her young childhood, then later raped by an adult man when she was twelve. With very few exceptions, nearly every romantic relationship that Anderson was involved in as an adult involved some level of abuse by men — whether the boyfriend who forbid her from posing for Playboy and threw forks at her head, Kid Rock ripping her dress and calling her a whore, or the infamous evening when Tommy Lee assaulted her in front of their children. And of course, there was the aftermath of the stolen sex tape, in which Anderson was subjected to humiliating and degrading depositions that wore so heavily on her, she walked away from the lawsuit, losing money but protecting her mental health and unborn baby. Anderson explains that the lawyers told her: 

That I had no right to privacy because I’d appeared in Playboy. Then came question after invasive question—about my body, sexual positions, sexual preferences, locations I had sex in—and suggestions that I probably liked the attention. I thought, What does any of this have to do with them stealing or selling our private property?

Anderson describes the different horrors in her life in distinct ways. She is angry at her father for the abuse he inflicted on her mother and sometimes herself and her brother, but she is also deeply compassionate when describing his violence. She acknowledges his trauma, the drinking that he eventually stopped, and his good qualities—that he was “a reader, a thinker, a dreamer.” Alternatively, she writes about the abusive babysitter and the man who raped her with a kind of truncation that is relatable to anyone who has written about such unthinkable experiences. She tells us quickly, she does not linger.  

When it comes to her boyfriends and husbands, she oscillates between neutrality, heartbreak, and even humor. When she writes about badly-behaving men whom she does not love, she writes with a sort of indifference. After describing a ridiculous brawl between Tommy Lee and Kid Rock, she writes: “Boys will be boys.” This is what is most fascinating to me about Anderson’s story juxtaposed with many #MeToo narratives. She nonchalantly describes “many bizarre encounters where people felt they knew me enough to make absolute fools out of themselves,” then moves on. As an example: when she walked in on Jack Nicholson mid-threesome in a Playboy mansion bathroom, he locked eyes with her, ejaculated, and thanked her for, Anderson writes, “getting him to the finish line.” She seems indifferent about this. 

For Anderson, what hurts is specific, unique, not quite predictable: losing Tommy even after he’d hurt her; the media and lawyers suggesting that she was “asking for it” (exploitation, robbery, etc.); feeling the pain of another divorce. What doesn’t hurt: posing naked; idiot male superstars being gross; and, at one point, paying off a Vegas gambling debt by agreeing to have sex with one of the men, a long time friend (she explains that they did this in a joking way?).  

To cope with all the things that do hurt, Anderson turns primarily to nature and to literature. She had an intimate relationship to the trees and animals of her early island life, and she continues to notice the landscape around her in her Malibu home, and wherever she travels. The details of the flora are important enough to her to include throughout the book. She name-drops books and poems that have gotten her through hard-times, and she channels both this love of the planet and her bookishness into consistent activist work. She has worked closely with PETA, gotten Russia to change laws that harmed whales, and is a close friend and advocate of Julian Assange. Her political engagement too is a way to step outside of the pain she experiences at the hands of men and the media. 

It is her role as a mother that she takes most seriously, though. The descriptions of her time on movie sets, doing global advocacy work, or wandering through the forest are all beautiful, but when she writes about her sons, the most potent warmth fills the pages. 

Julia Fox’s memoir, like Anderson’s, recounts intense details of harm. Fox, who was born in Italy but grew up primarily in New York City, was severely neglected by her parents. When she was four, she was locked in a bedroom while her father went to work, and was left to use the cat litter box to relieve herself. She writes disdainfully about her mother whom she describes as absent or, when she was around, cruel and without boundaries. 

Her relationships with men are mostly horrifically abusive—she is kidnapped by one drug dealing boyfriend who also cheats on her, beats her up, stalks her, and drives her to a suicide attempt. She goes on to date several other men who are physically and emotionally violent, coercive, and controlling, and often, like her, have a problematic relationship to drugs and alcohol. Unlike Anderson, Fox fights back against them, verbally and physically. She sometimes notes shared trauma as the foundation for the violence, but often just describes it, like Anderson, with a sort of “shrug.” Her “healthiest” relationship in the book is arguably with a married Sugar Daddy who pays for her and her two friends (Fox is intensely committed to her friends, who she’s described in interviews as her “chosen family”) to live in a big loft and start a fashion line. Her relationship with Kayne West takes up very little space in the book, and although it was not violent, it was controlling, and also….weird. Kanye—pardon me, “the artist” as she calls him surely per NDA-requirements—only seems to show her affection when the cameras were on them, he told her how to dress, insisted they turn her birthday into a photo op, and generally treated her like, she says, “a show monkey.” But she’s not in love with him and the strange relationship ended with much less anguish than most of Fox’s other romances. 

Hindsight is generally a necessary component of a good memoir, but Fox does not bring a great deal of it to her story. What Fox does do is tell us everything. Or writes in a way that feels like everything, which in itself is a stylistic choice. Because part of the everything that Fox does is a lot of drugs, the book felt nearly Burroughs-esque in its shameless recounting of the banality of addiction. In addition to descriptions of heroin, cocaine, blackout nights at various New York clubs, and lots and lots of weed, Fox also tells us rather nonchalantly about her time working as a dominatrix in a dungeon, specific details about various orgasms, and many examples of criminal activity (from petty theft to—my favorite—times that her dad would bring the family to temporarily occupy the homes of vacationing rich clients for whom he did renovation work). 

Here and there, she also gives some semblance of radical political analysis. She describes going to protests against the war after 9/11, numerous interactions in which the police harmed more than helped a situation (usually involving some kind of violence against a woman), and, towards the end, how she took her son to attend marches after the murder of George Floyd. Fox—who has repeatedly denied that she had any assistance from a ghostwriter—is in many ways writing like a salacious but neutral reporter, one whose life makes for a compelling story, whose prose is  richly descriptive and, honestly, not so bad. 

Britney Spears’ story, despite having many overlaps with Pamela and Julia, is a bit of an outlier. A critic at The New Yorker called it “a nightmarish fairy tale,” and writer T. Kira Madden posted on Instagram that she would teach it alongside Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. The Woman in Me is the stuff of gothic horror, told to us by ghostwriter Sam Lansky, with the kind of soft and silly energy we’ve come to expect from Spears. The juxtaposition is disorienting and gutting sometimes. The book begins in Spears’s childhood where she, like Anderson, describes a spiritual connection to the nature she grew up around. Then we meet her father, first through a description of her father’s father, June, a man who institutionalized two wives, one of whom—after a bout of forced lithium usage and a miscarriage—died by suicide. The foreshadowing is bone chilling. Several decades later, Spears’s own father, Jamie, institutionalizes and drugs her. 

Lanksy, known for celebrity profiles and his fiction work, also had support early on in the process from two additional writers, Ada Calhoun and Luke Dempsey. The three of them vary in age and gender, all with a different relationship to Spears’ celebrity. In a story about the writing process, New York Times reporter Jacob Bernstein reflects that it was “not unlike that of contemporary pop hits, which typically rely on the contributions of numerous collaborators.” It’s fitting for Spears, and still one I’d argue is a feminist move. If we can trust Spears’ notably unfiltered Instagram captions, she loves the book. That she felt enough trust to talk with any of these writers is significant, given the trauma of so much betrayal.  

Lanksy ultimately creates a voice for Spears that evokes an undeniable innocence, but without infantilizing her. Anyone who follows Spears on social media knows she has a sort of girlishness about her—she even jokes in the foreword of the book that she could have written the whole story in emojis—but in telling this story of her near-imprisonment, Lanksy sought to amplify Spears’s autonomy. He strikes a perfect balance. The Woman in Me is the story of a capable adult who also clearly lives with severe CPTSD, the effects of forced and dangerous mood stabilizing drugs, and the ghosts of a stolen childhood. We are given the history for her rise to fame—from a working-class childhood with an alcoholic father to her time in New York City where she was an understudy on Broadway (alongside Natalie Portman) to the Mickey Mouse Club, and on through her first album featuring the song that put her on the proverbial map, “…Baby One More Time.” 

She tells us about meeting Justin Timberlake, who was also a Mickey Mouse Club cast member, years later while touring with his group, N’SYNC. It was during this period that she realized she was in love with him; and they began the kind of romance that you can tell still aches in Spears’ heart, twenty years later. “I don’t know if when you’re younger, love’s a different thing, but what Justin and I had was special,” Spears writes. After the breakup—fueled by a number of factors including her making out with backup dancer Wade Robinson, and Justin’s frequent cheating—she suffers the kind of heartbreak that unmoors a person. She describes herself as “comatose” and unable to speak, and wonders even now if she was “clinically in shock.” She loses Justin’s family in the breakup too, a family with whom she had felt, maybe for the first time, real care. It is a turning point in her life, especially given the media’s response to it. Justin’s post-breakup album suggested that she cheated, and while Britney never said  the same of him, (a truly remarkable high-road move) she is treated as a harlot. 

What follows is mostly pain, with some blips of reprieve. She is bashed by journalists (mostly women) who accuse her of dressing too provocatively and being a bad influence on young girls, she is let down by new boyfriends, and her father becomes more and more controlling. The moments that make her happy are making good music, and, at first, performing. But as her father gains more control, she has less ability to be creative, and the joy is gone. In one frequently criticized performance, she explains that her lack of energy was intentional. Her small-scale act of resistance against the media backlash and her father’s control was refusing to flip her hair around. She declares that hair flipping was one of the sexiest and most desirable things she could do, so she stopped. (Later, in the midst of postpartum depression, she  famously shaved it off completely.) 

Like Anderson, Britney describes motherhood with an overwhelming sense of devotion. She falls in love with the father of her children, Kevin Federline, after a long string of disappointing flings. Despite  being set up with fancy businessmen and upstanding industry types, she says she picked Kevin because “he held her.” She didn’t know that Federline had a girlfriend and a nine month old baby, but he left them soon and married her. They had a two-year relationship, in which she gave birth to her two sons and helped launch Federline’s notoriously embarrassing music career. Not long after her second son was born, he became an absent partner. Astoundingly, he still gained primary custody after the divorce; and Spears’s ability to see her sons was made even harder after the conservatorship, instituted by her father, began shortly after in 2008. 

The conservatorship stories are like a fog. Hazy. Descriptions of the only food she was allowed to eat for years: grilled chicken and canned (canned!) vegetables. No access to her bank account. So many psych wards. Accusations of “energy supplement addiction.” Boyfriends that seem selected by her parents. Being tricked into going to a home with a SWAT team waiting for her. Forced Vegas residencies while she begs for time off to take a trip with her boys. And in one bone-chilling scene, her father taking over her desk space where she kept receipts (a defiant act, she explains, of showing she could indeed take care of herself, keep her things in order) and proclaiming: “I’m Britney Spears now.” 

In all three books, a happy ending is gestured at, but with a healthy level of ambivalence. Spears was, at the time of the book going to press, happily married to a personal trainer, but shortly after the book’s release, they announced their divorce. Anderson, who seems of all of them the most self-aware and far along in her “healing journey,” is single and grappling with the possibility that she’s a love addict. Fox is single, sober (ish?), and writes a triumphant “fuck you” ending. These are each women who love, who obsess, who, as Pamela notes, thinks of their life not in years but in relationships with the various men she’s been with. 

For these women, happily ever after will be complicated regardless of whether or not they find a finally-healthy relationship. They are also living in the fractured afterglow of egregious ’90s and early-00’s media abuse and the current internet meme culture of making jokes out of women who seem like easy targets (which is true for Fox, though arguably, she is in on the joke, or sometimes ahead of it). Societally, there is a seemingly collective remorse for the treatment of women, but these memoirs are still, in ways I find unique to those of many other celebrity women, illuminating some of our culture’s most persistently problematic approaches to sex and sexuality. 

What is striking for me about these three women is how they demand complexity. Feminists want easy solutions and if we can’t get easy solutions we want easy blueprints to identify harm. But this is where we go wrong: we cannot make blanket statements about what is and isn’t sexually harmful if we do not take into account the particularity of individuals’ triggers and attachments. This is not to say that we cannot build broadly useful consent practices but that we can’t think about transformation of the world if we do not let the specificity of people’s stories transform us. 

Anderson, Fox, and Spears offer us a glimpse at a working-class-raised femininity that is in some ways always-already hypersexual. Their whiteness mitigates the consequences of this—Black women celebrities, and certainly Black women who are not famous face far worse—but still, there is a freeness with their sexuality that we don’t necessarily see from famous women who are understood to be classier. But these women also demonstrate agency, and not an easy #GirlBoss feminism (though Spears does parrot that hashtag), but a nuanced one in which they are eager to be sexual beings in private and public. In short, it’s complicated.