Having HER CAKE and eating it too

Pamela Anderson is back in the spotlight this time on her terms. She shares how a return to her childhood home inspired a new cookbook and a fresh perspective on life.

- STEPHEN ORR

Over the past few years, Pamela Anderson has had more time to contemplate life. That is, until things kicked into high gear again-but more on that later. At the start of the pandemic in 2020, she moved from France, sold her house in Malibu, and headed north to the small town on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where she was born and raised. She hunkered down with her two grown sons, Brandon and Dylan. She bought her grandmother's old motel, renovated it, and set up her parents there. A lifelong cook, she perfected her baking skills. She reclaimed and expanded her grandfather's garden on the same land where she had run barefoot as a self-described wild child. It's the site of both her greatest childhood joys and harrowing traumas, which she describes candidly in her 2023 autobiography, Love, Pamela, and Netflix documentary, Pamela, A Love Story. Almost poetically, for Pamela has journaled and written poetry her whole life, she has reclaimed her true self and her youthful creativity on the exact spot where they were born. When I had the chance to sit with her and talk over Zoom recently, our conversation quickly moved beyond her new cookbook, I Love You (due out in October), to all aspects of life-and her ability to find the deepest of meanings in even the tiniest of seeds.

Q Pamela, I want to talk about what home means to you, which is currently Vancouver Island, where you grew up. When you're not there, what do you do to make yourself feel at home?