My Life So Far, Jane Fonda
My Life So Far, Jane Fonda
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My Life So Far

Author: Jane Fonda

Narrator: Jane Fonda

Abridged: 10 hr 2 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/05/2005


Synopsis

She is one of the most recognizable women of our time. America knows Jane Fonda as an actress and an activist, a feminist and a wife, a workout guru and a role model. Now, in this extraordinary memoir, Fonda reveals that she is so much more. From her youth among Hollywood’s elite and her early film career to the challenges and triumphs of her life today, Jane Fonda reveals intimate details and universal truths that she hopes “can provide a lens through which others can see their lives and how they can live them a little differently.”

Fonda divides her “life so far” into three “acts,” writing about her childhood, first films, and marriage to Roger Vadim in Act One. At once a picture emerges: a child born to the acting legend Henry Fonda and the glamorous society princess Frances Seymour. But these early years are also marked by profound sadness: her mother’s mental illness and suicide when Jane is twelve years old, her father’s emotional distance, and her personal struggle to find her way in the world as a young woman.

By her second act, Fonda lays the foundation for her activism, even as her career takes flight. She highlights her struggle to live consciously and authentically while remaining in the public eye as she recounts her marriages to Tom Hayden and Ted Turner, and examines her controversial and defining involvement with the Vietnam War. As her film career grows, Fonda learns to incorporate her roles into a larger vision of what matters most in her life–and in the process she wins two Academy Awards, for Klute and for Coming Home.

In Fonda’s third act, she is prepared to do the work of a lifetime–to begin living consciously in a way that might inspire others who can learn from her experiences. Surprising, candid, and wonderfully written, Jane Fonda’s My Life So Far is filled with universal insights into the personal struggles of women living full and engaged lives.

About The Author

Jane Fonda was born in New York City in 1937. She attended the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, and Vassar College. Fonda later studied with renowned acting coach Lee Strasberg and became a member of the Actors Studio in New York. Her subsequent work on stage and screen earned numerous honors, including two Best Actress Academy Awards–Klute (1971) and Coming Home (1978)–and an Emmy Award for her performance in The Dollmaker. Fonda was also a successful producer, whose credits include The China Syndrome, Nine to Five, On Golden Pond, and The Morning After.Fonda revolutionized the fitness industry with the release of Jane Fonda’s Workout in 1982, which remains the top-grossing home video of all time. She then produced twenty-three home exercise videos, thirteen audio recordings, and five bestselling books. She now focuses her time on activism and philanthropy, in such areas as adolescent reproductive health, pregnancy prevention, school reform through arts, and building resiliency in girls and boys by addressing destructive gender stereotypes. In 1995 she founded the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention (G-CAPP), which she chairs. In 2002, she opened the Jane Fonda Center for Adolescent Reproductive Health at Emory University's School of Medicine. She lives in Atlanta.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Carol on March 02, 2016

Jane Fonda writes about her personal life with such honesty, warmth, and openness that I couldn't give this book less than four stars. On the other hand, whenever she discusses politics, history or even the movie business she's strangely out of touch and preachy at the same time. So I just couldn't......more

Goodreads review by steffie on April 23, 2007

Freakin' Hanoi Jane. Love her or hate her, she's never dull. A disclaimer of sorts: Jane Fonda was a huge part of my upbringing. Huge. My dad hated her and cursed her name whenever "On Golden Pond" appeared on HBO (which seemed to be all the damn time), and my mother and I did her exercise videos eve......more


Quotes

“Belongs alongside the memoirs of Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Marilyn French and Katharine Graham . . . To hold this book in your hands is to be astonished by how much living can be packed into sixty-plus years.”Los Angeles Times

“[A] sisterly, enveloping memoir . . . an intimate, haunting book that might as well be catnip from its ever controversial author.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times 

“Terrific . . . rich . . . unexpectedly quite moving.”San Francisco Chronicle 

“Fiercely intelligent, detailed, probing, rigorously revealing.”O: The Oprah Magazine 

“Fonda possesses a raw and affecting candor. . . . Her honesty [is] a force.”The Philadelphia Inquirer 

“A fearless book . . . fascinating.”Chicago Sun-Times 

“Truly compelling.”The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 

“Riveting.”Seattle Post-Intelligencer