We’re into
“biography season” with publishers releasing a slew of memoirs by or about the
great and the late in time for your Christmas shopping pleasure. Often it seems
the subjects of these books haven’t led lives worth recounting but that’s not a
criticism you can level at Pamela Stephenson. Actress, comedian, wife to Billy
Connelly, mother, Hollywood hob-nobber, clinical psychologist, writer,
adventurer, she’s crammed a lot into her 63 years.
What is different
about The Varnished Untruth: My Story (Simon
& Schuster, $37), is that it is conducted as a therapy session with
Stephenson adopting two voices – as both patient and shrink – as she tries to
find the answer to the question she asks throughout, “What is WRONG with me”.
This seems an
unnecessary device. Stephenson is insightful and candid enough for the memoir
to have worked without the therapist’s occasional butting in and progress
notes.
In fact, candid
doesn’t begin to describe the tone of this book. The first chapter opens with
an account of Stephenson bursting one of her fake breasts at a New York jive
club and by its end she has confessed both to being hooked on cosmetic surgery
and being the product of an unhappy childhood…and we’re still only on page 22…
The memoir
continues with the same odd but appealing mix of the frivolous, the profound
and the dazzlingly frank. Born in New Zealand and raised in Australia,
Stephenson pins most her adult angst back to the relationship she had with her
parents, both academics who were low on affection and high on expectations.
Since they are now dead she can say what she likes about them and she does.
Kicked out of home
as a teenager, she ended up prey to the pimps and drug pushers of Sydney’s
seedy King’s Cross and from there into an abusive relationship that pushed her
close to ending her life.
Performing was
what saved her. Having won a place at Australia’s National Institute of the
Dramatic Art, she went on to act in theatre, television and movies.
Despite all the
professional wins – from her role on UK satire show Not The Nine O’Clock News to a her more recent third place on Strictly Come Dancing – Stephenson
continues to suffer from a sense of worthlessness, a fear of rejection, a need
for adrenaline etc that she believes is rooted in her parents’ inability to
give her the love and attention she craved. This introspective blame game does
start to wear a teensy bit thin eventually.
So thank goodness
for all the name-dropping! From dinner with Peter Sellers to parties with Elton
John and Sarah Ferguson’s hen night she serves up a small feast of celebrity
titbits, all of them harmless fun mind, and the only famous person she ever
depreciates is herself.
There are times in
The Varnished Untruth when Stephenson
is discreet, particularly where her children are concerned. The memoir is also
gappy at points as she glosses over episodes like her sailing adventures that
have been covered in previous books.
So what is Pamela
Stephenson. An outrageous ego? A fierce intelligence? A funny woman? Possibly
all of those. But she knows how to write and knows how to live and those two
things add up to an autobiography worth reading.
Footnote:
Footnote:
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