Diane Keaton’s Very Different Kind of Memoir

Memoir is a slippery, intimate craft. To trust the memoirist, a reader must believe in the author’s ability to remember with some degree of clarity. But when writing her new book, Brother & Sister, the Oscar-winning actor Diane Keaton rejected the fidelity of her own memory altogether—in part because the story she wanted to tell isn’t solely her own. Keaton’s second memoir examines her strained relationship with her only brother, Randy. Once close, the two grew apart as a young Keaton found success in Hollywood, and as Randy later struggled with mental illness, alcoholism, and social isolation. Because her brother now has dementia, Keaton needed to look elsewhere to reconstruct the past.

It helped that her late mother, Dorothy, had meticulously documented her four children’s upbringing in 1950s Southern California via photography., she uses these family relics in an almost journalistic way: to corroborate her recollections of Randy, to challenge them, and to fill in the gaps where she never quite knew him at all. Apart from telling a poignant story about two siblings, is a fascinating exercise in writing a personal and methodical tale about someone who has come to feel, in some sense, like a stranger.