“It does not happen all at once. You become. It doesn’t often happen to people who break easily or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept.’’

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.

Actress, peace activist, mother and a woman of many parts, Jane Fonda quotes these words in the epilogue of her autobiography, `My Life So Far’ (Random House) to sum up her long journey back into her own skin. A journey during which flashes of wisdom, dark nights of heartbreak and the clarity of peace gave her a sense of her authentic, cohesive self. And yes, it did not happen all at once. It took sixty years or more for her to find her core and own it without apologies or fear.

In the Act One of her book, she appropriately quotes ``Everything is gestation and then birthing,’’ (Rainer Maria Rilke) but ironically her birth happened more than sixty summers later, after she had forgiven her mother for killing herself, her father for never conveying affection to his children and herself for betraying and suppressing her inner voice .

On the surface she had done it all. She was Brand Fonda. Celebrated actress and path blazing fitness icon. The daughter of Hollywood legend Henry Fonda. Winner of two Oscars. Controversial campaigner for peace during America’s inexplicably stubborn war with Vietnam. The mother of two children. A grandmother. Survivor of three broken marriages. But she still had not learnt the one important  lesson that many of us leave the world without  imbibing. That life is not lived from outside in but from inside out.

Transformation
This last realisation was a key to Fonda’s personal transformation from a woman who played many roles on screen with conviction but had lived a large part of her personal life in denial and in being subservient to others. It was during her third marriage to media baron Ted Turner that she began to see that, ``When you confront problems and work them through, what might have been rupture become stronger at the broken place. Still, much of me remained a handmaiden to my insecurities. My long-standing fear of not being good enough kept me feeling that if Ted knew me fully, he couldn’t possibly love me. I was willing to forfeit my authenticity to be in a relationship with him.’’

This is a dilemma that keeps women far less accomplished than Fonda in cages all their lives because coming out of bad relationships, dead end lives or protective shells would mean owning their own personalities, their strengths and weaknesses and take responsibility for their own destinies.

When she turned sixty, Robin Morgan’s phrase, ``Silence is the first thing within the power of the enslaved to shatter. From that shattering, everything else spills forth,’’ in a way summed up the process that led Fonda to speak out for herself for the first time. Looking back at her own life made her see, ``threads of continuity like suspension bridges that had spanned the canyons of change in my life. I could see that the main thread was courage in everything except my personal life.’’

Fonda was afterall a woman who had walked through bombed out Vietnam with a fractured foot, collecting evidence on how American forces were hitting civilian targets and survived not just sudden showers of sharpnels  but also prolonged persecution by American government agencies who wanted to prove that she was anti-national and disruptive. Despite such courage, she had allowed herself to be a ``puppet, ready for a man to pull my strings,'' a docile woman who allowed first husband Roger Vadim to demean her with his sexual libertinism, forgave her second husband Tom Hayden for cheating on her with a nanny and finally Ted Turner for giving her a hugely interesting life but one that had no space for her to just be anything other than a trophy wife. 

Approval seeking
She had been an approval seeking slave to men she did not even need financially! She had spent most of her life being obsessed with physical perfection, hiding her bulimic tendencies, hating herself, trying to be many things to many people.

For a daughter who never received one word of approval from her parents, growing up without a sense of self was not surprising but still Fonda is a hugely remarkable woman for using her fame to connect with larger issues like peace, humanism, literacy, human dignity and health for all. And then she somehow managed to find peace within as well.

Even though at sixty two, she found herself, ``alone again, living in my daughter’s guest room. I didn’t feel alone because I wasn’t. I was with myself for the first time and proud that I had not capitulated out of fear. So what if had taken so long? What matters is that I got there.’’ And in the end, each failure for her turned out to be an opportunity for redefinition, ``almost like repotting a plant when the roots don’t fit anymore.’’ Today, she knows she can teach others what she has learnt, ``We must show `perfection’ to the door and help girls respect themselves whether or not they conform to society’s current norms. We must talk to them about feelings, relationships and sexuality and most important, listen to them and HEAR them.’’

Today Jane Fonda is inviolably herself and can proudly say, ``Every line on my skin and scar on my heart — I can own them now. Each story and individual, each metamorphosis have come to live in my blood, brain, heart and soul. And finally, so have I.’’