two celebrity bio faves
One of my guilty pleasures is the celebrity biography. I don’t have high expectations most of the time; it’s as clearly an act of safe voyeurism as anything can be, and unsurprisingly, celebrities lives are often as messed up as everyone else’s if not more. Still, the fascination is impossible to resist and I’ve often found little gems of insight in pretty much every one I’ve read.
The two that I read last year, Jane Fonda’s My Life So Far and Goldie Hawn’s a lotus grows in the mud, were no exception.
I’m well aware that Hawn’s book was met with mostly lukewarm reception by the critics but I found the book to be lyrical and uplifting. I’m as fascinated by the way an author represents and views her life as I am with the life itself. And I found Hawn’s gentle and positive outlook on life to be very inspiring.
Little vignettes about her early life, her career, and her personal life were often funny even through some of the heartbreak. She shared some all too human and incredibly embarrassing moments with such candor and humor that sounded very familiar to me; the time she couldn’t stop laughing at a staid and oh-so-serious luncheon, to the embarrassment of her mother, until she had her own mother laughing and mortified at the same time, was something I know I’ve experienced, for example.
There was just something so heartwarming and human in that, making me love and admire Hawn in a way that I hadn’t previously. I just really loved the book and I read it at a time when I needed a bright spot like that in my life.
A lovely passage:
“Picking up my pen again, I try to write but abandon the attempt. Sipping my wine and staring out at the ocean. I hear my father’s words again in my head. “Go, whenever you feel too big for your britches just go out and stand in front of the ocean. Then you’ll see just how small you are.”
Jane Fonda’s My Life So Far struck me as being a very honest, very introspective and a very sincerely attempted uncompromising look back at a very complex and catalyzing life. Alot of people don’t like or understand Fonda, but I believe she is one of those important lightening rod personas that appear in every generation, forcing us all to look at ourselves and the world around us and question what we see, who we are and how we represent and stand up for the things we believe to be right.
Not that Fonda holds herself up as having made great choices; often far from it, and she sincerely attempts to explain and understand where she came from and why she did some of the things she did, and made some choices that in hindsight were truly disasterous.
But I found her writing and storytelling compelling and her attempts at self-understanding to be insightful and rewarding. I never doubted that she was coming from the most authentic place she could find within herself. But I was struck by how very often her decisionmaking and her life choices were based on pleasing the man in her life, starting with her devotion and idolization of, and desire to please her father, legendary great, Henry Fonda.
Fonda seems to be a person who never does anything halfway. She is earnest and striving always to live a purposeful and ethical life. She is also honest to the point of bluntness and she has lived a life of verbally taking no prisoners and that most certainly includes herself.
A beautiful, telling passage:
“All my life I had been a father’s daughter, trapped in a Greek drama, like Athena, who sprang fully formed from the head of her father, Zeus — disciplined, driven. Starting in childhood, I learned that love was earned through perfection. In adolescence, my feelings of imperfection centered on my physical being, and I abandoned my poor, loyal body and took up residence in my head. Whether you are male or female, that split between body/heart and mind is the fatal one when it comes to being a fully realized person. Your soul becomes homeless. In the house of the Fathers, there is no room for the soul.”
“I am referring here to ‘father’ not in the biological sense but metaphorically, to the house of the Fathers, the patriarchs — to a way of existing by seeing myself through the eyes of men and accomodating them on the deepest, invisible level (while seeming to do the contrary) and, in doing so, delivering a part of myself to a world that bifurcates head and heart, renders empathy (for oneself or for others) impossible, and makes both men and women, boys and girls, less human than they inherently are.”
I thought the book was both courageous and thoughtfully penned, all the while maintaining that legendary Fonda dignity and authenticity. Though she will undoubtedly remain a lightning rod for controversy, I believe she has grown into a person of deep insight and wisdom to share with those willing to listen.
