Composing a Further Life

learning, mostly from the Vietnamese, about what strength is. That the bamboo is stronger than the oak. That the kind of strength that our culture thinks is important is ultimately not as important as compassion and flexibility and collectivity.
    “The main people that I worked with during those years of my morning-to-night, twenty-four-hour, all-the-time activism, from about age thirty-two to fifty-two, when I married Ted [Turner], were men. It was led by men. I so admired my second husband, Tom Hayden. He had a depth of experience in the movement that I lacked, so I believed in his narrative and it became my narrative, yet I always knew that I would have to find my own narrative in time. It wasn’t until my third act that I developed my own narrative, which is really a gender journey. It’s a gender narrative. That part of the activism is different. Part of the sameness is the fact of optimism. I’m hopeful.”
    “ ‘I can make it better’?” I said, quoting back to Jane a phrase she uses repeatedly in her memoir. 2
    “Yeah. That’s right. I can make it better, really can make it better. And I have a role to play in that.
    “I’ll tell you something that’s different now. When I started off, I was ashamed of my differences from fellow activists. The movie
Barbarella
was playing, and I was a celebrity. I wasn’t rich, but I certainly had more money than they did, and I could draw in money. And I wanted to become just like them so I could fit in and not feel that separation.
    “Now I understand my role and I’m very comfortable with it. I’m not a visionary, I’m a cheerleader. I can help take the vision out to large numbers of people. The metaphor that I see is that I’m a repeater—you know, at the top of mountains they have those antennas that stick up that pick up the [radio] waves from down in the valley and carry them on? I see myself as a repeater. There have to be visionaries, and there have to be repeaters.” It’s a good metaphor, but it applies to only part of what Jane does. She also amplifies the message and the vision and transforms it by the decisiveness of her own engagement into a call to action and a reachable goal.
    I had been pondering the ways in which Dick Goldsby and Ted Cross spoke about legacy, and before raising the question with Jane, I asked myself how I would use the term in thinking of her and found a series of different ways. Since I see my own legacy in my writing, I thought of her films and books. I thought of
Jane Fonda’s Workout Book,
3 which has made young women aware of how to care for their bodies, and I thought of her as a model for activism. Last of all, I wondered whether the conversations she and Tom Hayden had created among Vietnam veterans and servicemen had contributed to a new understanding of the psychological damage done by warfare even to those with no physical wounds—the mysterious maladies sometimes dismissed as cowardice and sometimes called in previous conflicts battle fatigue and shell shock, now understood in the wider context of post-traumatic stress disorder. I had a list, but Jane surprised me with a three-word answer: “My life story,” she said.
    “I thought of it as a book for women,” she continued, “but men really responded to it. You know, there’s the idea that you can’t show vulnerability, you can’t show weakness, you have to suppress emotion. And then this notion of ‘good enough is good enough’ is important, not in the same way as for women, but it’s the same theme.”
    “The problem of trying to be perfect,” I remarked. I wish [D. W.] Winnicott’s concept of the ‘good enough mother’ were known by more young American women. 4 “You can’t be the perfect mother,” I remarked. “You know, I had that same experience with
Composing a Life
, that men responded to it, and some have complained to me about my writing about discontinuities and conflicting commitments as if these were only women’s problems.”
    “What do you answer?” Jane asked.
    “I answer that, as far as I’m concerned, women are human beings and these are human problems. I happen to have chosen female examples to look at, reversing the way that for centuries women have been reading books, ostensibly describing human beings, that were actually based only on men. Some men will not learn from a book in which the examples are women, and some men will. That’s why I’m including men specifically in the book I’m working on now, to