All of Me - Patsy Palmer

...Patsy Palmer, so I borrowed All of Me from the library. Patsy is most known for her role as Bianca in EastEnders - you remember, the one with really long red hair who was married to Ricky? Yes, that's the one.

The book is 310 pages long and tells Patsy's story from childhood through to the end of 2006. She is now thirty-five years old, married with three children. Her daughter shares the same name as one of my daughters - Emilia - ...
...book's title. If you put All of Me into a search, you will find it has been used as the title for umpteen books, albums and films over the years. Even Patsy's EastEnders co-star Barbara Windsor has an autobiography called All of Me! So it is rather clichéd and makes it a bit dull.

It is also a bit ridiculous, as there is no way a book could really tell everything! As with every autobiography, this is the edited highlights. There will ... more

I love reading autobiographies and was interested in discovering more about Patsy Palmer, so I borrowed All of Me from the library. Patsy is most known for her role as Bianca in EastEnders - you remember, the one with really long red hair who was married to Ricky? Yes, that's the one.

The book is 310 pages long and tells Patsy's story from childhood through to the end of 2006. She is now thirty-five years old, married with three children. Her daughter shares the same name as one of my daughters - Emilia - which is one reason I am interested in her. She is also close to my age.

Patsy Palmer isn't my favourite actress by any means, but I enjoyed her role in EastEnders and liked what I saw of her in the recent programmes of The Verdict, where she was a juror in a close-to-reality court case.

I read the book in just a few days, as it is written in an easy style and the pages fly by. I enjoyed the way it was written - the chronological style, the details she included about her family and her childhood and how she got into acting. Her words come across as honest and frank most of the time and it is easy to hold your interest in reading it.

She discusses her unhappy time at school and how she much preferred the acting world to everyday school, enrolling in Anna Scher's famous theatre as a child. Some of the most fascinating sections for me were about how her acting career developed, how the audition process worked and how she came to be offered the roles he did. With my eldest daughter embarking on an acting career herself, it is always useful to get some insider tips after all.

Patsy is a true East Ender and the furthest she has lived from her roots is in Brighton. The first shock I had was discovering her real name is Julie Anne Harris as I had never realised Patsy wasn't her real name. In fact, Patsy Palmer is her mother's name (like Jean Harlow took her mother's name too, after Harlean Carpenter was deemed unsuitable!). Whereas many celebrities seem to adopt the persona of their new name, Patsy refers to herself as Julie several times and seems to see Patsy as very much a stage name only.

I enjoyed reading the anecdotes about other famous people she knows and has met. She went to Anna Scher's with several household names, then her time on EastEnders brought more friendships and her general celebrity status has meant more encounters. But this didn't feel cheap or as though it was name-dropping too much.

She has had a long friendship with Sid Owen, long before their on-screen partnership as Bianca and Ricky and he comes across as being a lovely bloke - which was just how he seemed on I'm A Celebrity last time. (Incidentally, Patsy assures us she will never do I'm A Celebrity or Big Brother, but did make an exception on her 'no reality TV' pledge for Strictly Come Dancing.)

So the book has plenty of advantages. It comes across as being honest, you can hear her 'voice' (although she does credit her ghost-writer and admit that's where the book's structure comes from), and it is interesting and holds the reader's attention.

But there are disadvantages too. One minor one is the book's title. If you put All of Me into a search, you will find it has been used as the title for umpteen books, albums and films over the years. Even Patsy's EastEnders co-star Barbara Windsor has an autobiography called All of Me! So it is rather clichéd and makes it a bit dull.

It is also a bit ridiculous, as there is no way a book could really tell everything! As with every autobiography, this is the edited highlights. There will be some things she has chosen to omit, some she has forgotten and others that couldn't be published for fear of legal suits. Maybe 'A Bit of Me' would have worked as a better title?

But my main complaint is this - she goes on and on and on ad nauseum about her addiction! She was only eleven when she first smoked cannabis and soon got into drinking alcohol, smoking and taking drugs - beginning with dope, but following up with pretty much everything except heroin. (Her older brother was a heroin addict.) She continued taking large amounts of drugs throughout her twenties, particularly cannabis, Ecstasy and cocaine. It was only in 2004 that she finally managed to stop drinking and using drugs, with the help of a support centre called the Twelve Step Fellowship.

While this is obviously an integral part of her life - and therefore of her autobiography - I felt the issue was over-emphasised. Drugs seem to be mentioned on almost every page - or it certainly felt like it - and it was very repetitive. Looking back, the book felt like it went "I did this and did that and got drunk and stoned. Then I did this and did that and got drunk and stoned." It just became boring! I found myself drifting off during the bits where the focus was on her addictions and concentrating much more on the other (rarer) bits, where she just got on with the story.

The book is subtitled 'life, love and addiction' but I think it would be a fairer representation of she had just called it 'My Drugs Hell' or something similarly tabloid-like. At least with Danniella Westbrook's autobiography (The Other Side of Nowhere), you knew it was about that side of her life from the outset.

So, that is my main criticism. An over-emphasis on her addiction spoiled the book for me somewhat. While I enjoyed it overall, I wouldn't bother buying it and I would recommend it, but only with a few 'but's in the answer. 

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