“I’ve always had trouble putting words together,” Diane Keaton writes in her 2011 memoir, Then Again. “In a way, I became famous for being an inarticulate woman.”
As always, Keaton drastically underestimates herself. The Oscar-winning legend starred in classics like Annie Hall, Sleeper, The Godfather, The First Wives Club, Baby Boom, Father of the Bride, The Family Stone, and Something’s Got to Give before her death earlier this year at the age of 79. She was also a talented photographer, editor, documentarian, preservationist, director, singer and a famed Hollywood house flipper. And in her three memoirs—Then Again, 2014’s Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty, and 2020’s Brother and Sister—she proves herself a delightfully insightful, loopy writer, whose love of collage is evident in her free-form exuberant style: a pastiche of letters, poems, conversations, and artwork, which she uses to tell the story of her life and loves.
Unlike most Hollywood stars, Keaton’s books seek to get super deep: to explore, examine and uncover. They also have a surprising undercurrent of melancholy, with frequent meditations on death and a heart-wrenching recounting of her beloved parents’ last days. But there is fun as well, as the original (and most interesting) manic pixie dream girl talks honestly about everything from her great friend Carol Kane to her unrequited love for costar and friend Jack Nicholson.
Above all, Keaton proves herself to be an utter original, a woman who lived by her own terms and her own code of ethics. “I’ve always loved independent women, outspoken women, eccentric women, funny women, flawed women,” she writes in Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty. “When someone says about a woman, ‘I’m sorry, that’s just wrong,’ I tend to think she must be doing something right.”
Picture Perfect
Diane Hall was born on Jan 5, 1946, in Los Angeles, the first child of Dorothy and Jack Hall. In many ways, her parents were opposites: Dorothy (winner of the Mrs. Los Angeles pageant in 1955!) was a sunny optimist, gregarious, artistic and an open-minded Democrat. Jack was an upright, Republican civil engineer who worshipped capitalism and the teachings of Norman Vincent Peale. But both believed in the promise of the American dream, and that they could create an ideal family life.
Their daughter Diane believed this as well. “The utopia Southern California held out to those of us who grew up in the fifties was irresistible,” she writes in Then Again. “We believed happiness would come from owning a Buick station wagon, a speedboat, and a Doughboy swimming pool.”
