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William Brace holding my aunt Harriet. Back row: my great-grandmother “Grammie” Hattie, unknown (could be Hattie’s sister), and my great-grandfather, Ten Eyck Hilton Fonda, Sr.

    Dad’s father and mother in front of their home in Omaha.
ACT II
    In my second act, the rap on me was that “there was no there there,” that I was only whatever my current husband wanted me to be. In fact, when I asked my daughter, who has made documentary films, to help me with the autobiographical video I was shooting for my sixtieth-birthday party, she said, “Why don’t you just get a chameleon and let it crawl across the screen?” I knew that one important thing I needed to find out through my life review was whether this opinion of me was true. I secretly thought that maybe it was.

    With Ted at my sixtieth-birthday party.
ERIC WITTMAYER PHOTOGRAPHY
    But as I delved deeper, I could see evidence of a new, stronger me starting to emerge. I felt as though I was owning myself for the first time. There is a there there!
PHYSICAL ABUSE
    The most profound event for me during the writing of my memoirs was when I was able to obtain my mother’s medical records from the mental institution where she killed herself. In them, the doctors noted that my grandfather had had the symptoms of a paranoid schizophrenic. He’d boarded up windows and kept the front door bolted because he feared that some man would come and steal his beautiful, much younger wife. The records included a fifteen-page autobiography written by my mother, I assume upon admittance, at the request of the doctors.
    In her own words, she revealed that she had been sexually molested at age eight by the piano tuner, the only man my grandfather would unbolt the front door for! All my adult life I had wondered about my mother’s childhood. The older I got and the more I understood about the long-term effects of early trauma, the more I intuited that something bad must have happened to her. Maybe that’s why I had been drawn to studying childhood sexual abuse over the previous five years. My research enabled me to understand what my mother meant when, in recounting her middle and high school years, she wrote, “Boys, boys, boys.” I was able to connect the dots upon reading that she had had six abortions and plastic surgery on her nose and breasts before I was born, in 1937, and that her psychiatric tests at the end were, according to the doctors’ reports, “replete with perceptual distortions, many of them emphasizing bodily defects and deformities.”
    By the time I read my mother’s reports I already knew that sexual abuse, be it a one-time trauma or a long-term violation, is not only a physical trauma; its memories carry a powerful emotional and psychic charge and can lead to emotional and psychosomatic illnesses and difficulties with intimacy. The ability to connect deeply with others is broken, and it becomes difficult to experience trust, feel competent, have a sense of self. Thus, another piece of the family’s intimacy puzzle fell into place.
    I also knew that sexual abuse robs a young person of her sense of autonomy. The boundaries of her personhood become porous, and she no longer feels the right to claim her psychic or bodily integrity. For this reason, it is not unusual for survivors to become promiscuous starting in adolescence. The message that abuse delivers to the fragile young one is: “All you have to offer is your sexuality, and you have no right to keep it off-limits.” Boys, boys, boys.
GUILT
    Then there’s the issue of guilt. It seems counterintuitive that a child would feel guilty about being abused by an adult whom they are incapable of fending off. But children, I learned, are developmentally unable to blame adults. They must believe that adults, on whom they depend for life and nurturing, are trustworthy. Instead, guilt is internalized and carried in the body, often for a lifetime—a dark, free-floating anxiety and depression that can cross