Being Jane

The foyer of Jane Fonda's loft apartment is a warm pink oval--softly lit, windowless and strangely familiar. A few paces in, the room narrows to a bright seam of a doorway that resembles the more unabashed works of Georgia O'Keeffe. "The entryway is a womb, and the door is a vagina," says Fonda in her startling vibrato. "I had it designed so that you're sort of delivered into the loft. Don't you love it?"

It takes a certain kind of person to turn her home into a symbol. One must either be carefree enough to think that nothing matters or intense enough to believe that everything does. Fonda has always been the intense type. What has united the various phases of her life--from daughter of a Hollywood legend to Parisian sex kitten, from Oscar-winning actress to Hanoi Jane, from first lady of fitness to Sun Belt Christian--is a zealous belief that each transformation has brought her closer to enlightenment, and an urgent need to share.

These days, Fonda has moments when she appears almost calm. At 67, she is a grandma who lives alone in Atlanta, walks with a limp (she recently had arthroscopic knee surgery and will have a hip replaced this summer due to osteoarthritis, a largely genetic condition Fonda says is unrelated to her famous workout regimen) and finds her former sex-symbol status faintly ridiculous. "I'm an old jalopy," she says, "losing hubcaps and fenders everywhere. But in so many important ways, I've never felt more complete. Which is why"--and here she slips into a fiery stage whisper--"I had to write this book."

There are plenty of people who long ago dismissed Fonda as a professional changeling and controversialist. For them, My Life So Far (Random House; 624 pages) offers juicy celebrity gossip and passages about her adventurous sex life (plus a convenient index). But Fonda doesn't acknowledge skeptics, and she didn't write her memoir--which reveals, among other things, that she suffered from bulimia for 30 years, how she never felt the closeness she yearned for with her father Henry and that she only recently found personal happiness, in part through a conversion to Christianity--simply to tell all. "I'm on a mission," she says. "For much of my adult life I have talked the talk of feminism and then given up my voice to keep relationships intact. And in my third act, presuming I live to be about 90, I've decided to confront it. This is not just my story. It's true for many women. And I want to socially inoculate as many girls, and boys too, as possible to let them know it doesn't have to be this way. Resist!"