It may have been 15 years since Jane Fonda's last film, but that doesn't mean her grip on our imagination has loosened-something I was reminded of last week when I dropped by my local bookstore to buy her new autobiography, "My Life So Far." Standing next to me at the counter was an older man whose friendly face clouded over when he saw the book.

"Not your favorite?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I can't forget what she did during the Vietnam War," he said. "And I don't think I could live long enough to forgive her."

There we were, two sides of the same coin, a card-carrying Fonda fan and a Hanoi Jane hater. Make that the same side, because when we look at Jane Fonda, we both see the same thing: a symbol. There may be bigger stars nowadays, but when it comes to symbolic power, few can match her.

Perhaps that's because, her book's title to the contrary, the 67-year-old Fonda has lived not one life, but many; lives full of accomplishment but also abrupt about-faces. Onscreen, she has played more than 40 different roles, but off-screen the number may be even higher, and many of them embody, in a larger-than-life way, women's shifting, conflicting roles over the past 50 years. Eager-to-please daughter. Rebellious adolescent. Sex symbol. Bulimic. Political activist. Successful businesswoman. Feminist. Trophy wife.

While Fonda claims to be at peace with all these contradictions-"My arms and heart are flung wide," she writes at the close of her book, "welcoming more transformation, wherever it leads"-she hasn't resolved them so much as moved on. Writing "My Life So Far" was, she says, part of her ongoing search for "an authentic self." Reading it suggests something a little different: that she approaches each stage of her life as a new role to be researched thoroughly, inhabited fully and then set aside in favor of a new part that will engage and energize her.

If this makes her a somewhat unreliable narrator, it also helps makes her the reliably interesting actor she is. Between 1971 and 1981, she turned in a series of fascinating performances, beginning with Klute, for which she won her first Oscar, and continuing through such films as Julia, Coming Home (her second Oscar), China Syndrome and On Golden Pond. For my money, it's in these roles that Fonda's search for an authentic self-a search laced with self-doubt, and illuminated by it-is most thrillingly realized, not only for herself, but for us as well.

Some people begrudge Fonda her liberal politics, but they were, like acting, part of her birthright. She was born in 1937 to Frances and Henry Fonda, and by the time she was 5, her father was one of the most famous actors in America, as well as an icon of American decency and fairness, thanks to his performances in films like The Grapes of Wrath and Young Mr. Lincoln. At home, however, Henry Fonda was emotionally remote and prone to "cold Protestant rages," while Jane's mother gradually succumbed to mental illness, killing herself when Jane was 11.

Fonda navigated these tragedies by cultivating an outward show of strength (her family nickname was "The Long Ranger") and an eating disorder that would plague her until her early 40s. With it came the usual complement of body image anxieties, which were only exacerbated when, at age 22, Fonda decided to go into a line of work where appearance is everything.

She recounts with wonder her first visit to the Warner Bros. wardrobe department, where she encountered a floor full of muslin-covered body dummies, each with the exact measurements of actresses like Marilyn Monroe and Natalie Wood, all of them headless-an object lesson about the relative importance of curves versus brains.

Following her first screen test, Jack Warner sent word that she would have to wear falsies, while her godfather, director Josh Logan, helpfully suggested she have her "jaw broken and reset and [her] back teeth pulled to create a more chiseled look." Of her own accord, Fonda sought out a plastic surgeon to see about having her breasts enlarged; he turned her down, saying she was "out of her mind to consider doing such a thing." (Later, in what I prefer to think of as a temporary midlife loss of sanity, Fonda did have her breasts enlarged, only to think better of it a few years later and have the implants removed.)

What leaps out from Fonda's descriptions is how much work it takes to create the feminine ideal found in Hollywood films, and how great the sense of havoc it can create in the women who serve as the raw clay (not to mention those of us in the audience who have to make do with our own unbroken jaws and unenhanced busts). The irony, of course, is that impossibly beautiful women are also one of Hollywood's great pleasures, for women as well as men. Fonda herself acknowledges that her own beauty has been a source of power for her, as well as a source of insecurity.

That was certainly the case during Fonda's relationship with French director Roger Vadim, or what she describes as her "female impersonator" period. Vadim turned Fonda into a full-fledged sex symbol, casting her in the soft-core camp classic Barbarella. He also spent her money, drank and gambled too much, saw other women and occasionally brought them home for group sex that Fonda says she consented to out of fear of being labeled "bourgeois." He was also, she writes, "the most charming, lyrical, poetic, tender of men," as well as a devoted father to their daughter, Vanessa. Her portrait of Vadim is one of the best things in the book, rueful but affectionate, and when she says, "I don't regret any of it-well, at least not most it," you believe her.

Another sharp portrait emerges in her chapter on the filming of On Golden Pond, the only movie she ever made with her father (and which was filmed on New Hampshire's Squam Lake). But the portrait is not of Henry Fonda-who remained his unreachable self, despite his failing health and a storyline that centered on a father-daughter reconciliation-but of his co-star, Katharine Hepburn.

At 73, Hepburn was still a force to be reckoned with: imperious, competitive and determined to get the best and biggest lakeside house. When Fonda mentioned she planned to ask a stunt double to perform a back-flip dive during one of her scenes, the famously athletic Hepburn shamed her into doing the dive herself, something that took her a month to master. But when Fonda was struggling during a crucial scene with her father, it was Hepburn who crouched in some nearby bushes in a display of strength and solidarity. "With her energy," Fonda writes, "she literally gave me the scene." Both Hepburn and Henry Fonda won Oscars for their performances; her fourth, but his first, despite a lifetime of worthy performances. "It was," his daughter writes, "the happiest moment of my life."

Perhaps the most infamous moment in Fonda's life came in 1972, when she traveled to Hanoi at the invitation of the North Vietnamese government. It was during this visit that she was photographed sitting on an antiaircraft gun-an unfortunate accident, says Fonda, but an image that has made her a "lightning rod for people's anger, frustration, misinformation and confusion about the war." You won't find this photo in "My Life So Far," but you will find several chapters in which Fonda describes in heartfelt detail her involvement in the antiwar movement, which consumed her life for several years.

There are those of us who found this Jane heroic, and who struggled more with some of her later decisions, including her six-year marriage to Ted Turner and her embrace of what seemed an old-fashioned role: a woman who gives up her own career and interests to marry a wealthy, high-maintenance man-albeit one with some nice second homes, including, from the sound of it, most of Montana. Turner also had a nice way with a birthday present: for her 60th birthday, he gave Fonda her own $10 million family foundation, and she founded programs to prevent teen pregnancy and sexual abuse in Atlanta, where she continued to live even after she and Turner divorced.

Like any life, "My Life So Far" has its flaws. Despite a note thanking her editor, "who gracefully persuaded me that less is more," this is one long life, 579 pages in all, some of them repetitious. And while Fonda writes that "the very changing nature of my life helps to make my story relevant to other people and also to the modern era," at times her life obscures not only other people, but whole decades, which exist largely as backdrops to her search for authenticity. That's also the case for the book's many photos, which usually feature Fonda dead center, looking her movie-star best.

My wish for Jane Fonda's life to come is that she'll go back to making movies-although, careful what you wish for. Next month brings the release of her first film since 1990, a scary-looking Jennifer Lopez comedy called Monster-in-Law, in which Fonda plays, presumably, the monster. She deserves much better, a string of films in which she can reinvent herself once more and become a new symbol for us all over again.