A Match Made In Heaven

MoDo reviews Jane Fonda: whose prose is worse? Ye gads, take a look:

''My Life So Far'' is not a lyrical title, but it captures Jungian Jane's Sisyphean, Oprahphean struggle to process her pain and banish her demons. Her book is a psychobabble loop of ''tectonic shifting,'' forfeiting her authenticity and feeling disembodied, then trying to reinhabit her body and ''own'' her womanhood and her space and her vagina, her leadership and her wrinkles and her mother, so that her ''authentic self'' can emerge; if the ''functioning self'' and ''embodied self'' could merge, she could fully engage with another fully authentic person in mutual affirmation, a whole being not overlapping into another being in a ''relational dance of patriarchy,'' and live happily ever after in a ''shrinking, congested planet with diminishing resources and no vast, conquerable frontier to escape and expand into.''

Of course, MoDo finds space to knock religion:

...about finding God: ''It was more an experiencing of His presence, a psychic lucidity, that was allowing me access to something beyond consciousness. It wasn't long, however, before I found myself bumping up against certain literal, patriarchal aspects of Christian orthodoxy that I found difficult to embrace.'' Duh.

We learn that Fonda was taught by the best:

[Roger] Vadim, she says, ''knew how to validate only my facade.'' She went into her radical chic phase, learning about black voting rights from Marlon Brando and the Vietnam War under the tutelage of Simone Signoret. ''Never underestimate what might be lying dormant beneath the surface of a back-combed blonde wearing false eyelashes,'' she writes.

Warning: don't read this next passage if you've had anything to eat recently:

She and...Tom Hayden...met, not cute but causey. Having finished a book about how the Vietnam War paralleled American ''genocide'' against Native Americans, he showed up at a slide show she had given about Vietnam. He was wearing a long braid and ''rubber sandals of the type I'd been told the Vietnamese made out of the tires of abandoned U.S. vehicles,'' and asked her for help with an art exhibit designed ''to show the Vietnamese as human beings.'' Within days, they were making love on the living room floor.

Wow. That really stinks. Really, really, really stinks...wow.