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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Fonda wrote her book on her own, without the help of a ghostwriter, and there are many places where it shows. Her chronology is often confusing: looping back and jumping forward, sometimes by decades. She doesn't seem to have much of a head for numbers, either; ages and dates don't always match up, and are often left out completely. Fonda's tone is conversational, and she dots many of her paragraphs with comic-book exclamations: "Wow!" "Weird!" "Ouch!" Her tenses jump from present to past so often that eventually they all blend together, and the text is riddled with emotionally emphatic italics, especially in chapters about politics -- "What are involved, informed citizens to do when presidents, vice-presidents, and secretaries of state give the public falsified evidence to justify war?" -- and her love life: "[Hayden was a] respected movement leader, passionate organizer, and strategist par excellence, who was even into American Indians." (Fonda has a thing for American Indians, and recalls praying to god, as a little girl, to make her brother, Peter, an Indian. She also likes men who are into bison. Seriously.) Fonda reports that "the Nixon Justice Department freaked" after the publication of the Pentagon Papers. At one point she disconcertingly asks readers: "Did you ever see the movie "Scent of a Woman" starring Al Pacino?" She is often "twitter-pated," experiences several "tectonic shifts" and sees many events as "germinal."
"My Life So Far" is also larded with the self-help-y assertions of a woman who has spent many years in therapy and a lot of time with Eve Ensler, as indeed Fonda has. There is a lot of talk about how she's been "disembodied" and needs to "own" her leadership, her voice, her sexuality, etc. Fonda apparently has never met a popular self-diagnosis she hasn't liked, so pages at a time are gunked up with Oprah-isms about "the disease to please" and Robin Morgan's "nictitating membrane" (the milky lid that cats have over their eyes) that Fonda writes "would settle over my being." To make use of Fonda's italics: What does that mean? The moments in which Fonda indulges in this sort of self-analysis are the weakest and dullest parts of the book.
But they are most frustrating because they distract from the deeply weird ride that Fonda takes us on. Her ability to absorb the ideas of those around her isn't always gag-inducing; it can also be pretty comical. Fonda claims to be a rapacious reader, and scatters quotations from other texts throughout her book. Of course she may have written her life story with a Bartlett's close at hand, but she deploys her references with an enthusiasm that suggests she has probably read most of the works she's drawing on. Among her favored sages are Rainer Maria Rilke, Carrie Fisher, Mary McCarthy, Florence Nightingale, Charlotte Brontë, Rumi, Philip Lopate, Carolyn Heilbrun, Quincy Jones, Thomas Edison, Katharine Graham, Joseph Campbell, Robert Heinlein and Howell Raines ("Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis").
Fonda is not shy about showing readers how her consciousness has evolved, and how little she knew to begin with. She recalls how when her first husband, Roger Vadim, exclaimed in 1964 that America will never win a war in Vietnam, "I wanted to ask 'Where is Vietnam?' but I was too ashamed." A 1970 journal entry that Fonda reprints in the book reads: "Don't understand the women's liberation movement. There are more important things to have a movement for, it seems to me." "Did I write that? Whew!" is her present-day self-chastisement. Fonda scolds herself repeatedly throughout her autobiography. At times it feels as if every other sentence is about her anger at herself for having been so weak.
Her self-punishment makes a reader feel sad for this woman who is so much harder on herself than anyone else (except for a few thousand angry veterans) could ever be. There is something depressing -- if sort of charming -- about Fonda's aspirations to better herself. When she has a daughter, she names her Vanessa, partly in tribute to actress Vanessa Redgrave, whom she doesn't even know well at the time. But Fonda is fascinated by her because "she is strong and sure of herself and was the only actress I knew who was a political activist." True, Fonda admits, she "didn't know the particulars of her politics" back then. But she had once read in a magazine that Redgrave "went to bed studying Keynesian economic theory!"
