Brother & Sister: A Memoir
Diane Keaton
(Knopf, 176 pp, £19.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.99 • Tel 01420 592974
I Love the Bones of You: My Father and the Making of Me
Christopher Eccleston
(Simon & Schuster, 336 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 01420 592974
One of Them: From Albert Square to Parliament Square
Michael Cashman
(Bloomsbury, 432 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • Tel 01420 592974
Quirky, zany, with that famously winning smile, Diane Keaton – on screen – has mainly been a comic turn. Off screen, her life’s been less consistently humorous. In Brother & Sister, Keaton charts her handsome, talented brother Randy’s steady, terrifying descent into confusion, anger, alcoholism and, eventually, Alzheimer’s. Now 74, her days as Woody Allen’s film muse a distant memory, Keaton (inset, in the TV series The Young Pope) feels consumed by guilt that she didn’t “do something” to stop all this as her career took off. “I want another chance to be a better sister,” she writes.
She is hard on herself. Some Hollywood stars turn their backs in contempt on their humbler relations, but Keaton never fell into that category. In any case, her loyalty, their mother’s boundless love, and their father’s boundless wallet, had no effect. Randy, it seems, felt too much, too deeply, to deal with the expectations loaded on the shoulders of the only son of an aspiring middle-class family in post-war America. Keaton comes across as a helpless bystander, not an agent in her brother’s downfall. Some catastrophes cannot be averted, they can only be observed and mourned, which Keaton does, very movingly.
