For her part, the 77-year-old Steinem continues to fight the fight, having recently returned from a trip to South Korea, where she had delivered speeches at Ewha Womans University and the Seoul Broadcasting System Global Digital Forum in Seoul. Back home in her apartment in New York City, she spoke by phone with fellow journalist and activist Maria Shriver.

MARIA SHRIVER: So how did you feel watching this documentary for the first time?

GLORIA STEINEM: Well . . . [laughs] Our own lives feel so disordered and confusing, so it’s amazing to me that the filmmakers caught the personal, emotional high points and low points of my life and not just the public aspects. I mean, at one point they show a photograph of my mother taken at Oberlin, where she had gone to college for one year before her family ran out of money. Later, she went back with me when I spoke there. I look at that photograph and remember how much that meant to her-and to me. So it’s one thing to find the public moments, but they also found the private moments.

SHRIVER: You talk in the film about your mother trying to be a writer, a wife, and a parent, and becoming really unglued by all of that.

STEINEM: Before I was born, she had what was then called a nervous breakdown. So the truth is, I don’t quite know what happened. Decades later, when I was in college, she was in a mental hospital for a couple of years, and she finally got some help. I asked one of the doctors there . . . He said the closest he could come was that it was an anxiety neurosis. I asked him if he would say her spirit was broken, and he said yes. It was only then that I began to understand she had given up being a pioneer reporter, given up on her friends, and everything she loved.

SHRIVER: As you worked to become a writer and have your own life, did you ever worry that what hap- pened to your mother would happen to you?

STEINEM: No, I never thought for a millisecond that would happen. Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother–so I wouldn’t be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally. I wasn’t as close to her then as I now, in retrospect, wish I had been.

SHRIVER: Did you try to run away from associating with her?

STEINEM: No. I took care of her and I loved her, but I couldn’t let myself realize while she was alive how alike we were. I couldn’t afford to realize how alike we were. But now I have her books, and I see from what she was reading that we were more alike than I was able to admit. When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was–and that my real parents were going to come get me. I was just too different from the rest of the family, so I lived in books and in my imagination.