My Life So Far by Jane Fonda

I am a generation too late to really know much about Jane Fonda, and started reading her autobiography when a friend recommended it. There is lots of name dropping; clearly Ms Fonda was well-connected in her prime, but I don’t recognise most of the names since they were just before my time. Nevertheless, it’s a compelling story.

I was fascinated to read how such a successful woman could be haunted all her life by feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. Despite her feminist leaning and her courage (or was it foolishness?), there’s a strong theme that without the support and approval of men, she felt worthless.

I found her description of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnamese war a disturbing indictment on the power wielded by the American military and the way in which the U.S. President of the time used it to play out his power games in a foreign country about which he had no understanding. The parallel between Vietnam and the current Iraq war became more startling to me the more I learned about what had gone on in Vietnam. I grew up with the belief that the U.S. were unquestionably the “Good Guys”. After all, they were instrumental in saving Australia from being invaded by Japan in World War II. To realise that they had been batting for the wrong team in Vietnam, and now Iraq, I found truly disturbing.

The other theme that struck a chord with me, whether Fonda intended to or not, was that naivety and courage sometimes go hand-in-hand. It was clear that some of her actions, such as her visit to Vietnam to highlight the U.S. bombing of dikes in the river delta, was amazingly naive. She put herself in considerable danger, and was at times manipulated by her hosts. Yet it was also enormously powerful. It reminded me of times in my life where I have thought “I’m really being very naive here”, yet gone ahead anyway because I thought there was a more important cause than just avoiding my own foolishness. And these have been some of the most invigorating times for me.

I found some of Fonda’s off-hand comments about perceived differences between the experience of women and men rather polarizing. She appears to believe that men are largely immune from the sort of self-esteem and sexuality issues that she sees so many women suffering from; if only this were the case. In fact, men suffer from these things too; but it shows in different ways. Hers manifested in an eating disorder and deep-seated need to please men. Nixon had a deep-seated need to create an enemy in his mind out of a peace-loving people on the other side of the planet so he could try to wipe them out. These are both manifestations of the same thing: poor self-esteem. They just came out in different ways. One inwardly destructive, the other outwardly. But even this isn’t necessarily a gender-based difference.

Fonda make the compelling point that aggression and war are generally seen as masculine and active, while peace is seen as feminine and passive. The U.S. Presidents who initiated and supported unwinable wars in Vietnam and Iraq were doing so because they had a point to prove: that they would be strong in the face of a perceived threat. Big boys playing with toys to prove who was the bigger man. The lies and deceit necessary to maintain the charade belied what was really going on. Fonda gives a fascinating account of a meeting she initiated with a group of disgruntled ex-Vietnam vets who were angry at her anti-war activism. They still harboured terrible grief about the war, but felt it unpatriotic to be angry at the government despite the lies it had told; so they aimed their anger at anti-war activists like her instead. She diffused the situation by getting them to talk about what was really going on for them. Vilifying anti-war activists like Fonda was just part of the governments’ efforts to sustain the war so that the men in power could prove how manly they were, and the veterans were just some of the victims. You would think the people in power would have learned something; except for the obvious parallels with the current war in Iraq, which those in power are oblivious to. Fonda points out that at the same time the U.S. Were sending troops into Iraq, their government was also slashing benefits for returned servicemen, and that at the time of the Vietnam war, anti-war activists were actually more supportive of returned servicemen than were pro-war activists. Reading the press you would have got the opposite viewpoint.

I don’t know if Fonda used a ghost writer; the story gives the impression that she wrote it herself, and that some of the pieces of the puzzle of her life didn’t fit together until she spoke to other people about issues during the writing process. I was surprised to find that her book held my attention through all 600 pages. I rarely make it through books that thick, and had no particular interest in Jane Fonda at the outset but nevertheless found her biography quite interesting.