The 67-year-old activist, actress and workout proponent reflects back upon her eventful life.
Critic Reviews
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Favorable
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Houston Chronicle Clifford Pugh
Whether you love her or hate her, all but her most venomous critics would have to conclude she has lived a fascinating life. As celebrity books go, this is a good one.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Susan Salter Reynolds
Fonda runs the gamut. To hold this book in your hands is to be astonished by how much living can be packed into 60-plus years. [5 Apr 2005, p.E1]
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle David Kipen
Fatteningly rich, frequently maddening but unexpectedly quite moving new memoir.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Janet Maslin
In her sisterly, enveloping memoir, My Life So Far, this chameleon appears in yet another incarnation: soap opera queen.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Maureen Dowd
At first you think how much more readable her book would be if an editor had chopped out large chunks of ponderous psychic burrowing. But then you realize it all has to be in there, in her own voice.
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Favorable
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The Guardian Natasha Walter
This book's similar mixture of the raw and the studied gives it a surprising force. Fonda may not give us an answer to all her incarnations, but she gives us the feel of them, the play of them, which is also the feel and the play of 20th-century America.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Laura Thompson
She (Fonda) is a remarkable woman, and My Life So Far, which is an unusually worthwhile autobiography, bears the firm imprint of her complex, febrile and essentially noble character.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Gerald Kaufman
Fonda, of course, has the right and the status to tell her story any way she wants, but I do wish her editors had taken their scissors to her stylistic excesses.
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Mixed
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Sydney Morning Herald Daphne Guinness
Fonda's story is self-flagellation pure and simple, and reading it is curiously therapeutic. If someone so talented, good-looking and successful can go through such mental monstrosities and come out smiling, maybe we will, too.
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Mixed
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Atlantic Monthly Tom Carson
That Fonda can still be an unconscious narcissist after all these years is triumphant proof that she's as American as smart bombs and Bozo.
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Mixed
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Washington Post Jonathan Yardley
That sense of oneself as red-hot center of the universe is pretty hard to stomach, and there's a good deal of it in My Life So Far.
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Mixed
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New York Observer Ann Patchett
Again and again, she springs into action when it might have been better to wait and think things through, but it's that constant drive to leap that makes hers a compelling life and makes this an interesting book, even if it is bloodless at times. [18 Apr 2005, p.24]
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Mixed
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Publishers Weekly
The actress-cum-activist-turned-aerobics instructor (and now philanthropist) has a lot to say and, for the most part, it's interesting-if readers can hang on through the too-frequent, lengthy passages of self-analysis.
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