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objectivity. The quality of my relationships to certain people and events in my past—my mother and father, especially—was also transformed, as was how I feel about myself now. In a way, I discovered the feisty, strong girl I had always been.
    The Meaning We Assign to Our Lives
    Only recently, while reading Man’s Search for Meaning, by the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, did I understand why my personal life review had such an effect on me. Frankl, who spent many years in a Nazi concentration camp, came to the conclusion that everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing: your freedom to choose how you will respond to a situation. That, I now believe, is what determines the quality of the life we have lived—not whether we’ve been rich or poor, famous or unknown, healthy or ill. What determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities: what kind of meaning we assign them, what kind of attitude we cling to about them, what state of mind they trigger.

    Act I: Me at age three.

    Act II: Me with Vanessa, speaking at a rally in 1972 when I was pregnant with my son, Troy.
© VINCE COMPAGNONE

    ACT III: AT THE GOLDEN GLOBES, 2011.
FRAZER HARRISON/GETTY IMAGES
    Beginning a Life Review
    It was the day of my fifty-ninth birthday—December 21, 1996—when it first hit me: In one year I will turn sixty, and that will be the beginning of my last act—the final three decades of my life. “Last”s and “final”s had not been featured in my prior vocabulary, and, frankly, as I faced the looming six-oh, I felt a knot in my stomach.
    I was leaning against a hay bale in the back of a pickup truck when the realization swept over me. Four cowboys and I were heading back to headquarters after a long day rounding up bison on one of Ted Turner’s spacious ranches in southern New Mexico. Dear reader, I know this is not the first time something in my life has sounded like a scene from a bad western movie script! But that’s how it was.

    Me rounding up bison on one of Ted Turner’s ranches in southern New Mexico.
© ANNIE LEIBOVITZ/CONTACT PRESS IMAGES
    As we drove across the top of a high mesa, the vast, lunar landscape extended as far as I could see—endless, flat mesas, volcanic rimrock, steep canyons where exposed geologic strata gave evidence of upheavals and ancient oceans, created perhaps during Paleolithic times. Surrounded on all sides by stark reminders of the earth’s fourteen-billion-year existence, I felt the issue of time—the inexorability of it—pressing in on me. Okay, I know that in the grand scheme of things, three decades are negligible, but this was my life. Those three decades to come were my decades. What had I done with all the time—the almost six decades—now past? What did I want to do with my remaining time? How could I make the most of these coming years?
    In the theater, the Third Act is when everything that has happened in Acts I and II must pay off if the play is to be memorable. “Maybe life is like that,” I thought. Maybe, in order to know how to have a good Third Act, I needed to look back at Acts I and II—to do what is called a life review. Maybe in order to answer my own questions, I would have to figure out what my first two acts had been about.
    I knew I had to clear a path to my future by clarifying the road from my past until now. As I said in my memoirs, My Life So Far, I didn’t want to be like Christopher Columbus, who didn’t know where he was headed when he left, didn’t know where he was when he got there, and didn’t know where he’d been when he got back.
    As we drove past walls of exposed rock, I saw how the stratifications revealed events, layered one on top of another over long periods of time. Just like life. Experiences are laid down, and for a while, the most recent one is the top, the plateau, the ground on which you walk. But then newer experiences occur and new layers are put down, changing the size and color and slope of what