by Jane Fonda
Unlike boys, girls begin to feel pressure to conform to gender norms at the onset of adolescence. A woman will want to closely explore those early teen years, when she may have become disembodied, when her true self might have gone underground, her voice become muted.
As I said earlier, I have found that when you make yourself write things out, whether in longhand or on a computer (which is how I write), you are forced to be more intentional and you learn more deeply than if you simply think about your life.
Getting your story published—or even read—is not the goal. Just write. Commit yourself to paper—with all the truth and courage you can muster. Try to interview the key elderly people in your life now, while they are still alive. But even if your parents and grandparents are no longer living, there are probably relatives and friends of the family who remember things. If your life remains too busy for you to actually write, at least gather the information that is most at risk of being lost, as friends and parents die, so you’ll have it later when your pace slows down and you can address these things.
Try to identify the times in your life when you went through real developmental changes—when something inside you began shifting and you saw the world and your place in it differently. Adolescence was probably such a time, because that is when we begin to discover our identities independent from our parents.
The onset of the women’s movement may have been an important catalyst for many of us. Menopause can also be formative. Developmental changes can be purely internal transformations resulting from our realizing that how we’ve been leading our lives isn’t making sense anymore. Maybe we feel we haven’t been “leading” them, that they’ve been leading us, and so we commit to doing something significant about it. It may have been that external events triggered developmental changes—your parents got divorced, someone close passed away, you were fired from your job, you gave birth to your first child, your spouse left you. How you reacted and adjusted to these kinds of external events would have determined whether or not they caused developmental change and propelled you on to a new life course.
Don’t worry about allotting big blocks of time. Just start with Act I. Set aside an hour to begin the process. Get a notebook and a pen you like or, if it allows your ideas to flow more easily, use a tape recorder.
Think about the main events, the scenes that stand out for you. As you make progress, perhaps things will emerge in more detail.
Search out old family albums, scrapbooks, family trees. Study them carefully for clues. Spend quiet time visiting old haunts, like the houses and neighborhoods where you grew up, and try to conjure up how you felt back then. Attend school reunions, interview your old classmates, and explain what you’re doing. Who knows, it might inspire them to do their own life reviews! Play the old songs from your past. Music is an evocative way to call up forgotten images. A single stimulus may bring forth buried memories. In his masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust illustrated this beautifully: The protagonist eats a small cake he enjoyed as a child and memories come flooding back.
It’s good to carry a pad with you so that if a thought comes to you, you’ll be able to jot it down.
Maybe, like me, as you remember yourself as a child, an adolescent, a young women or man, and so forth, you will discover that to a significant degree, your developmental changes revolved around issues of gender. In my case, I rediscovered the trying to please; the needing to be authenticated by a man; the self-hatred, especially of my body; the responses to my mother; my remote, objectifying father; and the eventual emergence of my own voice. For me, the evolving metaphor for my life thus became that of a gender-role journey. I believe that many women and men doing a life review will find this to be true, too; or in any case, it may be a helpful metaphor for their own journey.
Other metaphors might be the challenges of poverty or violence or always needing to be the best at everything—competitiveness. If you come from a family where alcoholism played an important role, your metaphor may have involved being the hero or the clown—two common roles for children of alcoholics that may follow us into adulthood.
Discovering a metaphor for the story of your life can open you to internal growth, renewal, expanded self-definition, surprising energy, and healing, because your story will then resonate with the universal story.
It wasn’t until I was able to see my own life as a gender-role journey that I felt ready to begin writing my memoirs at sixty-two.
CHAPTER 11
The Importance of Friendship
…Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.
But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.
Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no seconds,
and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten hundred thousand, your own country.
It goes on one at a time,
It starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
It starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.
MARGE PIERCY, excerpted from “The low road”
in The Moon Is Always Female
With son Troy on his Bandits set.
Saying “We” and Knowing Who We Mean
It is May 2008. We are in my Atlanta loft having dinner. My brother, Peter, is next to me. He’s flown in from Los Angeles, as have my son, Troy, and daughter-in-law, Simone, along with Bridget Fonda, Peter’s daughter, and her three-year-old son, Oliver, who is sitting on the floor playing with my grandchildren’s toys while they—nine-year-old Malcolm and five-year-old Viva—throw pillows down from the second-floor balcony to build a fort. Their mother, my daughter, Vanessa, is at the table, calm as usual in the midst of raucous children. Odd as it may appear to some, Ted Turner is sitting at the far end of the table with Elizabeth, one of his girlfriends, whom I like. This evening represents a long overdue coming together for my family, and I cannot help but be emotional as I make a toast to love, friendship, and continuity.
The hook that got us all here is the thirteenth annual fund-raiser for my nonprofit, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention; the theme this year is “Three Generations of Fondas in Film.” Tomorrow the family will be interviewed onstage about our careers by Robert Osborne, the host of Turner Classic Movies, and the evening will end with an homage to Henry Fonda, our father and grandfather.
Malcolm and Viva, all dressed up to go out. Clearly Viva is happier about the dress-up part than Malcolm.
Reading to my grandchildren, Malcolm and Viva, around 2005.
Me with brother Peter, niece Bridget, and son Troy at the Fonda Family Film Festival in Atlanta in 2007.
But the payoff for me is this gathering of the clan, some members of which, because of festering family “issues,” have not been in meaningful contact for more than two years. It was my seventieth birthday last year that launched me into shuttle diplomacy and a commitment to change the situation. I wanted to say “we” and know who I meant. I was tired of not being sure that it included kin. I hated that I hadn’t met Peter’s daughter’s son, my grandnephew, that he
didn’t know his second cousins, my grandchildren, that I’d never had a meaningful conversation with Bridget about her five-year absence from film or tried to get to the bottom of what had been going on with Peter. It felt right that a clan gathering include Ted. Over the decade that he and I were together, his children and my children had grown close despite the odd-coupling of the two culturally disparate families—mine inclined to tolerance for tattoos, hip-hop, and a discreet earring, his to “yes ma’am, no sir” manners and following military academy rules. Since our divorce, Ted and I have shared the desire to keep it all as connected as possible. So he was excited when he heard we were coming together and asked to be invited, just as he was invited to my son’s wedding.
I had experienced the pain of losing family before there had been forgiveness and closure. Not wanting this to happen again motivated me to circle the wagons of love while there was still time. When the event that brought us together was over and I sent the West Coasters on their way, we all knew that we would stay connected—and we have.
I’ve come a long way since the days when the Lone Ranger was my role model. This isn’t surprising, considering that the template for the governing ethic of my world growing up was the rugged individualism of my father. It was partly a generational thing, partly his midwestern staunchness; but mostly, my father was reflecting core western values: A fully mature human being is independent and autonomous. Don’t need anybody. Be tough and self-reliant. Needing is a weakness.
This cultural scaffolding has posed a dilemma for women. We tend not to be rugged individualists. We build networks of friends upon whom we rely for relational sustenance, to boost our spirits, and to keep our secrets. Because of this, women had been considered less mature, irrational, and even pathological in comparison with men.
Wanting to avoid these labels, I tried to be more like men, not recognizing my emotional needs, much less expressing them, and always holding a part of myself in reserve. Men seemed to be where the action was, and being insular like them felt safer. A friend of the French film director Roger Vadim, my first husband, once said of me, “She’s great. Not like most women, more like us.” At the time, I viewed this as a compliment. This independence made me very strong. It also made me very weak, although it took me some sixty years to understand the nature of the dichotomy.
The strength part allowed me to embody that old family motto: Perseverate. It let me keep moving despite everything, and experience three marriages to challenging men without getting run over. The weakness part prevented me from experiencing that deep pocket of intimate love—surely the most precious one—which exposes a person to vulnerability. All of which brings me to the Marge Piercy poem that opens this chapter.
I love this poem. It takes me back to the early 1970s, when I first became an activist. I was newly into my Second Act, freshly arrived back home from France, wanting to throw myself into the movement to end the Vietnam War and, on a deeper, barely perceived level, feel that there was meaning to my existence.
At the time, I noticed how different the women activists were from any people I could ever remember meeting. Just being in their presence felt like a haven. I didn’t know I was missing community until I met up with it for the first time. These were the early years of the new women’s movement, and the feminists I spent time with in the trenches were intentional in living their values of noncompetitiveness and sisterhood—and it was powerful.
I remember vividly when I first witnessed this in action. It happened at a GI coffeehouse in 1971. Run by antiwar activists, these coffeehouses were meeting places that were springing up outside major military bases around the country. A few of the men on the staff had gone ahead on their own and passed out leaflets to GIs without consulting the women staffers. One of the women found out and protested. The men put her down for making a fuss, since they knew the contents of the leaflets would have been approved anyway. The other women on staff stood by her: “If we’re trying to model democracy within the staff, then process matters. You’re not entitled to take us for granted.” I’d always sided with the men—the winning side, or so I’d thought—so this brought me up short.
By now I’ve grown accustomed to these acts of solidarity among women, but witnessing the power and beauty of it when it was still so startlingly new to me burned away my individualistic dross and allowed the pure gold of friendships to enrich and cushion me. Today, as the separate skeins of my life weave themselves into its final fabric, I want, above all else, for there to be many threads of love shimmering through. I often think how different, how frightening, aging would be for me had this not happened. I know that I can lose everything but that my friendships with women, together with my family, will always be there, no matter what.
Most of my friends are younger than I am, some by more than twenty years. They are creative people, spiritual people, businesspeople, and activists for social change. We have one another’s backs. When I am down I can talk to them, and their understanding, advice, and encouragement lift me. I try to do the same in return.
When I had hip replacement surgery several years ago, Eve Ensler was at my bedside, massaging my feet, as I surfaced through the haze of anesthesia. “Why are you here?” I asked, unused to being tended to and knowing all too well how unimaginably busy Eve was. “Because I’m your friend,” she laughed. “Of course I’m here. I want to take care of you.” I allowed myself to relax into this caring, but it wasn’t easy. To paraphrase Ursula Le Guin, I am a slow unlearner, but oh my, how I love my unteachers.1
Eve Ensler in 2011.
PAUL ALLEN
With Pat Mitchell and Eve Ensler at Pat’s wedding to Scott Seydel.
With my friends Jodie Evans and Pat Mitchell at a fund-raiser for The Women’s Center.
REBEKAH SPICUGLIA, WOMEN’S MEDIA CENTER
With Lily Tomlin when she did her one-woman show in Atlanta.
My best friend, Diana Dunn (middle), and me (far right), age 11.
Left to right: Diana Dunn, me, and Sue Sally Jones in 2004.
It’s good to have younger friends. At least that way not everyone you know will die before you do! As Dr. Ken Methany, Regents Professor in the Department of Counseling and Psychological Services at Georgia State University, told me, “Someone said, ‘The worst thing about getting old is that there is nobody around anymore to remember when you were young.’ But there is compensation for this. Older people tend to have more intense relationships. So there are fewer people in the network, but the relationships are more intense, more deep. You can’t maintain all the acquaintances you had when you were thirty-five, you don’t have the energy to do all of that anymore, so people tend to invest themselves with a bit more authenticity, more disclosure.”
With Sally Field in the 1970s.
In 2011, with my friends Sally Field and Elizabeth Lesser, at then First Lady Maria Shriver’s California Women’s Conference, where we all spoke.
Me with my new haircut and Vera Wang dress at the 2000 Oscars, two months after Ted and I split up.
ERIC CHORBONNEAU/BE IMAGES
In Atlanta, with Pearl Cleage and her husband, Zanon.
I agree with this. I think it’s also nice to have different kinds of friends. My friends have values, passions, and even early traumas in common, but they’re not all alike. With a few I can talk about face-lifts and curtains. A few are immeasurably intense and make me feel downright sluggish in comparison, but they inspire me to expand my horizons and my heart. Three of my friends have rich spiritual lives. One is a Zen priest, one a reverend and a sexologist (a useful combination to have in a friend!). Paula Weinstein is my film-producing friend of more than thirty years who always housed me when I was single and in Los Angeles. Whenever anything is physically wrong with me, she will do the research to find the right doctor and actually go with me to the appointment to make sure I ask the right questions. I’m her daughter’s godmother; she’s a surrogate mom to my two offspring, the one they can go to for an unending supply of ad
vice and a wise referee when the family needs one. She’s the one who made me cut my hair and get Vera Wang to design a special dress for my reappearance as a presenter at the 2000 Academy Awards when I was under a bushel from the Ted separation, too down to think about hair and ready to wear an old number from ten years before. Many moons can pass without my seeing Paula, but when we do reconnect, right off the bat we drill down to an intense, subterranean level, as though no time has elapsed. Actually, that is true of all my women friends. I’ve had this with a few men, and I know it’s possible because two of my friends say they have emotionally intimate friendships with men. It’s far rarer, though.
With pal Wanda Sykes at the opening of Monster-in-Law.
KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES
With Pat Kingsley on the set of Georgia Rule.
For intimacy, men tend to rely on their significant other, which is why married men seem to do better and live longer, healthier lives than their unmarried counterparts. Because women form broader networks of friends, they do better following divorce or widowhood than men do.
The late Dr. Robert Butler, founding director of the International Longevity Center, told me, “We may have the old boys’ network that helps us get jobs, but we don’t have the same capacity for intimacy, for dealing with grief or dealing with the kinds of issues women are much more gifted at dealing with.”
