Diane Keaton’s Very Different Kind of Memoir

At first glance, Randy’s life might not seem like an obvious subject for Keaton’s memoir, a slim volume of 176 pages. The siblings’ paths in the world diverged after they outgrew their childhood bunk beds: Keaton has been a celebrated actor for decades; she’s traveled the world to shoot movies and to hone her skills. Randy, meanwhile, never left the county where he and his siblings were raised and found only periodic employment. Though Randy also found comfort in creative pursuits, most of his work as a poet and collage artist remains unpublished. Keaton admits that she often saw him as a burden, and Brother & Sister seeks, on some level, to atone for her absence or inattention. Keaton attempts this in part by deferring to her brother’s accounts, by interspersing her chronological recollections with Randy’s own words. “It’s hard to be a better sister or family member, because you can’t really put yourself in his shoes unless you really investigate it,” Keaton told me. “And I didn’t really. I was busy with me.”

Searching and rueful in tone, Brother & Sister departs from many celebrity memoirs in its focus. Keaton’s acting career is rarely invoked, and when it is, it’s to contextualize her family’s life at a given time. Neither is the book a neat fit in the category of addiction memoir, as Randy, now 71, can no longer narrate his own experience of alcoholism. While her regret animates many parts of the book, Keaton also writes of Randy’s life with a sense of wonder. After Randy becomes ill, Keaton inherits his belongings, and she marvels at the magnitude and inscrutability of the artistic work he produced. “I became the sole possessor of his two published poetry books, 500 collages, 54 notebooks, and 70 random journals filled with his own brand of cartoons—including my brother’s entire collection of the intimate feelings, fantasies, and disappointments underlying the mystery of his life,” she writes. “I want to understand that mystery. Or at least try to understand the complexity of loving someone so different, so alone, and so hard to place.”

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Keaton spends much of Brother & Sister appraising Randy’s collages and poems. Here, as in other parts of the book, her prose is meditative but not detached. (Brother & Sister is precise, for example, in its descriptions of the idyllic Southern California bubble that Randy and Diane inhabited as children.) Scrutinizing Randy’s creations, Keaton realized they actually composed her brother’s rare successes in life: “Randy did accomplish much of what he wanted in the sense of his writing and expressing himself,” she said. “And that fed him.” When we spoke, she read aloud a passage in which Randy reflects on a day from their youth:

Father is doing a handstand on the beach. His thin, muscular legs dangle backwards over his head. Once, a long time ago I studied the photograph. His face was not where it should be. Even after turning the picture upside down, something was wrong … Father upset nature. At least in my mind he did.

The scene captures the unique fear that their father, Jack, inspired in Randy—first as a boy and then as a man who didn’t meet Jack’s rigid expectations of masculinity. But it also gave Keaton insight into the way her brother saw the world around him. Where she experienced family trips to the beach as benign outings, Randy saw a threat. “Think about how he pictured Dad vs. me seeing Dad doing the same thing—completely different,” she told me. “And where was I for Randy? I wasn’t really there. I wasn’t there to examine or think of how he pictured the world.”

Keaton tangles with her own guilt throughout Brother & Sister. Still, she doesn’t hesitate to name some of the more unpleasant parts of her family history, especially those which Randy’s journal entries, and their mother’s, have helped her better understand. Some of the book’s most wrenching passages are those in which Keaton grapples with Randy’s destructive, rather than simply eccentric, behavior. She describes a time when their frightened mother wrote to her about Randy’s having disappeared for weeks. Where this memory might have otherwise been lost in a blur of recollections from periods of Randy’s alcoholism, Keaton quotes an entry from his journal that reveals the intensity of her brother’s resentment toward Dorothy: “I have gone to the land of muted rage, spectral skirts, and disembodied voices. I would have preferred a bitch for a mother, someone solid and distasteful—at least there would be a center, a place I could leave.”