After her assistant answers the door and then serves water in the living room, Fonda emerges from her kitchen, all layered hair, perfectly made-up face and lightly tinted eyeglasses.

When it's suggested that someone of her stature might be expected to live in a more posh neighborhood, Fonda shakes her head. "Oh, no!" she says. "I chose to live here. This is really great. When I lived in California, I didn't live in Beverly Hills or Bel Air. I lived in Santa Monica before it was chic."

She says she wanted to be near her daughter, Vanessa, who lives nearby. And she chose a grittier area because "I wanted to make a statement."

Throughout her career, Fonda, 67, has been about making statements, some more well-received than others. Now she has mined her history in a candid new memoir, "My Life So Far" (Random House, $26.95).

In the book, she discusses momentous events, including:

• The secret suicide of her mother when Fonda was 12. She learned that her mother had killed herself from an article in a movie magazine. "I knew instantly this was the truth, that they had lied to me about the heart attack."
  
  
• The bulimia that started while Fonda was a teen at a boarding school in New York. "For me the disease lasted, in one form or another, from sophomore year in boarding school through two marriages and two children, until I was in my early 40s. My husbands never knew, nor did my children or any of my friends and colleagues."
  
  
• The notorious 1972 trip to North Vietnam and the photo of Fonda sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, which she calls her "two-minute lapse of sanity." Fonda writes that the "buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen. It was my mistake, and I have paid and continue to pay a heavy price for it."
  
  
• Her marriage to TV mogul Turner and her subsequent retirement from the big screen. Turner wanted Fonda by his side, true, but she writes that she was ready to quit acting. "For all intents and purposes, I had decided to stop acting and producing by the time I met Ted, but once I committed to the relationship, it became a done deal. Ted made that abundantly clear."

But after a 15-year absence from movies, Fonda is starring in the comedy "Monster-in-Law," opening May 13. The two-time Oscar winner ("Klute" and "Coming Home") plays the consummate controlling parent whose son (Michael Vartan) is engaged to Jennifer Lopez.

Fonda is a small woman with a big, patrician voice and the flawless enunciation of a Vassar student. (She dropped out after two years.) She's focused and serious but also dryly funny, especially about working with Lopez.

"I normally would never wear velour or whatever this is called," Fonda says, pointing to the baby-blue sweatsuit she's wearing. Lopez "makes these things, and they're so comfortable. She's helped me get hip."

Even before it hit stores, her memoir made waves with inaccurate leaks about her marriage to Roger Vadim reported by the British tabloids — in the book, Fonda reveals details about their sexually experimental relationship — but Fonda welcomes the attention. After being out of the spotlight for so long, "I'm ready," she says. "My loins are girded."

The actress, who has appeared in more than 40 films, strived to make her book as honest as possible. "I knew it would just be another celebrity bio if I didn't really go to the why and the how I really felt. And that's what allowed me to not blame anyone and to assume responsibility. I write in layers. This is what I did. And then a few days later, this is what I really did."

Writing through tears

Fonda says she went through a six-month period of writer's block in the five years she devoted to her memoir. "I spent a lot of time by myself at my ranch in New Mexico. There were certain things, like writing about my mother, where I'd find myself

really, really cold, shaking, teeth chattering. There were times I'd be writing, and I'd be crying. I knew I wanted to start the book the year my mother died (1950), and I knew I wanted it to be very, very specific."

She says that her children, Vanessa, 36 (with Vadim), and Troy, 31 (with second husband Tom Hayden), read the book as she went along, as did Hayden and Turner. Her kids in particular "were really, really helpful in making me go deeper, always pushing me. They told me that you can't take for granted that people will understand why you loved (the men you married)."

She writes that Vadim, who directed her in the 1968 camp classic "Barbarella," was magnetic, intelligent and a loving father to Vanessa, now a mother of two. "I could write him as a wastrel and a misogynist or a charming, imaginative, wonderful guy, and both would be true. He was a very interesting man. I don't regret it for a minute."

What would Vadim, who died in 2000, think of her book?

"I think he'd say I was a good writer. All three of my husbands should feel, would feel, that I am fair. I wrote my marriages, all three of which were very, very important to me, in a way that makes it clear why I fell in love and why they had to end. Sometimes it was my choice. Sometimes it was his choice. Sometimes it was mutual.

"But I also think I made it clear that in each instance, I was starting down a particular path in my search for myself and met a man who could take me further down that path. None of my husbands were the Svengali the way some people think."

She's still friends with Hayden and Turner, and talks to Turner several times a week since their divorce in 2001. In her book, she describes her first sexual encounter with Turner as being like "Versailles with all the spectacular lit-up fountains."

The Vietnam photo

What's striking about her memoir is its lack of self-pity. The actress goes to lengths to both explain and hold herself accountable for her more controversial choices, most notably her 1972 visit to North Vietnam.

Fonda writes that she regrets being photographed laughing on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun in the notorious photo that got her branded Hanoi Jane. She says she hopes "that some veterans, when they realize all the work I've done with GIs, know that I wasn't against the soldiers. I hope that comes across."

She also realizes that Gen-Xers might know the seven-time Academy Award nominee best as the leotard-wearing Jane Fonda's Workout queen or as a foxy woman from the future who floats in her fur-lined spaceship.

"In some sense I'll be remembered for 'Barbarella.' That's fine. I think my best performance was in 'Klute.' That was my breakthrough movie. 'On Golden Pond' was an experience that people can only dream of. How lucky to have produced a movie and acted in it with my father before he died!"

Henry Fonda was distant and cold. And Jane Fonda concedes that when daughter Vanessa was born in September 1968, she was no Mother of the Year. "I didn't really know how to be a parent. I'm trying to make that up to her now."

And when her publicity blitz is over, Fonda will have hip-replacement surgery.

"The old joints are going. But I feel fine," she says.

Besides, she jokes, after all those book promotion interviews, "I'll be so ready to be put to sleep!"