La-di-da, and other reflections

Then Again

By Diane Keaton

Random House. 304 pp. $26

Reviewed by Carrie Rickey

Then Again, Diane Keaton's tasty if not exactly juicy memoir, is a double-take in more than one meaning of the expression.

This volume, slender, wry, and eccentric as the Oscar-winning actress herself, collages the journal entries of her late mother, Dorothy, with her own memories of generation-defining films such as The Godfather, Annie Hall, Reds, and Something's Gotta Give.

Intriguingly, the tribute from Diane to Dorothy contrasts the war bride and stay-at-home mom with the unmarried working mother surfing feminism's third wave. Keaton writes of herself as the realization of her mother's aspirations, crediting Dorothy, onetime singer in a Swing-era trio, with developing her fashion eclecticism, her photographic eye, and most of all, her love of family.

Dorothy was 24 when Diane, her firstborn, was delivered in 1946. Keaton was a month shy of 50 when she adopted Dexter, elder of her two children, in 1995, about the time Dorothy was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. From its warm evocations of Dorothy, who passed away in 2008, to its affirmations of Dexter and her brother, Duke, the book is a mighty river of motherlove that occasionally pauses in the eddies to reflect on Keaton's liaisons with Woody Allen, Al Pacino, and Warren Beatty.

Though the actress, who shed her father's surname for her mother's, says she was a mediocre high school student who didn't know a preposition from a conjunction, Keaton is a vivid, articulate writer, as self-deprecating today as she was in 1968. Then she wrote home to tell the family that a little tribal rock musical called Hair that she had a part in was Broadway-bound. "I've gotten carried away with the FOOD LIFE," she added. "Obese is an understatement."

She had a secret. She was bulimic. After gorging on 20,000 calories a day in bacon, Sara Lee, and Kentucky Fried, she spent hours throwing up. Woody Allen, with whom she had worked onstage in Play It Again, Sam, didn't know about the food disorder. Thinking Keaton was anxious about being between jobs, he suggested analysis. "It was the talking cure; the talking cure that gave me a way out of addiction," she writes, "the damn talking cure."