(Audio)Book Talk: THEN AGAIN, by Diane Keaton

Then Again
Diane Keaton (Twitter)
Audiobook read by the author
Random House Trade Paperbacks (2012), Paperback (ISBN 0812980956 / 9780812980950)
Nonfiction (memoir/autobiography), 336 pages
Source: Purchased audiobook (Random House Audio (November 2011), ISBN 978-0-307-93402-4; Audible ASIN B0067VIYKE)
Reason for reading: Personal (recommended by Beth Kephart)

Opening lines:

“Mom loved adages, quotes, slogans. There were always little reminders pasted on the kitchen wall. For example, the word think. I found think thumbtacked on a bulletin board in her darkroom. I saw it Scotch-taped on a pencil box she’d collaged. I even found a pamphlet titled think on her bedside table. Mom liked to think. In a notebook she wrote, 'I’m reading Tom Robbins’s book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The passage about marriage ties in with women’s struggle for accomplishment. I’m writing this down for future THINKING . . . '“

Book description, from the publisher’s website
In Diane Keaton’s memoir of her mother and herself, you will meet the woman known to tens of millions as Annie Hall, but you will also meet, and fall in love with, her mother, the loving, complicated, always-thinking Dorothy Hall. To write about herself, Diane realized she had to write about her mother, too, and how their bond came to define both their lives. In a remarkable act of creation, Diane not only reveals herself to us, she also lets us meet in intimate detail her mother. Over the course of her life, Dorothy kept eighty-five journals—literally thousands of pages—in which she wrote about her marriage, her children, and, most probingly, herself. Dorothy also recorded memorable stories about Diane’s grandparents. Diane has sorted through these pages to paint an unflinching portrait of her mother—a woman restless with intellectual and creative energy, struggling to find an outlet for her talents—as well as her entire family, recounting a story that spans four generations and nearly a hundred years.

More than the autobiography of a legendary actress, Then Again is a book about a very American family with very American dreams.

Comments: I surprised myself by deciding to read this at all. I remember people who had heard Diane Keaton talk about Then Again at one of the Book and Author Breakfasts at Book Expo America in 2011 saying that it was a memoir about her mother and Alzheimer’s...and that she’d made everyone, including herself, cry. At that point, I thought it would probably be for the best if I didn’t read it, especially since I’m not a particularly big fan of Keaton the actress and didn’t have that as a lure. But when it comes to memoir, I take what Beth Kephart says pretty seriously, and she said this about Then Again when she included it in the appendix of Handling the Truth, her book on the writing of memoir:

“Celebrities tend to write autobiographies. Diane Keaton didn’t. She wants to understand who her mother is, how her mother shaped her, and what kind of mother she is now, and to do this, Keaton artfully poses the right questions and, taking risks, leaves aside that which does not matter. She is quiet, unassuming, funny, graceful, and one believes she is telling the truth...Keaton writes because she is one of us. She writes to find her way."

That assessment made it a memoir I had to read, and I decided to let the author read it to me.

While Then Again includes autobiographical detail and, for the most part, follows a roughly chronological structure, Keaton does play a lot with the form. Pulling in excerpts from her mother’s volumes of personal journals and setting them alongside her own narrative, she looks for their similarities, notes their differences, and works through the ways in which her close, complicated family shaped the person she became. Letters, lists, and dramatic scenes are also part of Then Again, and the whole is a reflective, deeply personal, surprisingly engaging document.

As I said, I’ve never been a great follower of Keaton’s--mostly because her films just haven’t often ended up on my radar--so I learned quite a bit about her here. I was surprised to find out that she’s a Southern California native--because if you go by California-girl stereotypes, you wouldn’t necessarily peg her as one--and I enjoyed her reminiscences about growing up here back when the place really was something close to what the stereotypes still say it is. Nearly forty years later, she may still be best known for her role as the title character in Annie Hall, but I had no idea how much she really was Annie Hall; born Diane Hall, and sometimes called “Diannie” by her father--she adopted her mother’s maiden name, Keaton, professionally--she was unquestionably Woody Allen’s muse for that film.

Losing her mother to Alzheimer’s may have been what led Keaton to write this memoir, but I got a sense that it had been percolating for a long time, particularly once she became a mother herself--at 50, when most women her age are starting to look toward grandparenthood, Keaton adopted a baby daughter, and added a son to their family a few years later. Motherhood leads many women to see their own mothers in a different light; Keaton’s entry into motherhood overlapped her mother’s decline into Alzheimer’s, and that may have strengthened her drive to document Dorothy Keaton Hall, the remarkable woman who raised her. And I was struck that she’s asked the same question I have about my own mother’s early-onset dementia: could the condition be brought on by untreated depression and unfulfilled ambition?

Then Again truly is memoir, not autobiography, and it’s one that I’m glad I read in audio form. This one really shouldn’t be heard in any voice but the author’s, and if I wasn’t a big Diane Keaton fan before I read this, I might be on my way to it now. She hits just the right emotional notes--because she knows them intimately--and comes across as thoughtful, self-deprecating, and honest. I was far more charmed by an account of losing a mother to Alzheimer’s than I’d imagined I could be, and that’s probably because Then Again is more than that...and more than I’d imagined it was.

Rating: Book 3.75 of 5; Audio 4 of 5

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