Diane Keaton’s Memoirs Show She Had That Special Something

“I’ve always had trouble putting words together,” Diane Keaton writes in her 2011 memoir, Then Again. “In a way, I became famous for being an inarticulate woman.”

As always, Keaton drastically underestimates herself. The Oscar-winning legend starred in classics like Annie Hall, Sleeper, The Godfather, The First Wives Club, Baby Boom, Father of the Bride, The Family Stone, and Something's Got to Give before her death earlier this year at the age of 79. She was also a talented photographer, editor, documentarian, preservationist, director, singer and a famed Hollywood house flipper. And in her three memoirs—Then Again, 2014’s Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty, and 2020’s Brother and Sister—she proves herself a delightfully insightful, loopy writer, whose love of collage is evident in her free-form exuberant style: a pastiche of letters, poems, conversations, and artwork, which she uses to tell the story of her life and loves.

Unlike most Hollywood stars, Keaton’s books seek to get super deep: to explore, examine and uncover. They also have a surprising undercurrent of melancholy, with frequent meditations on death and a heart-wrenching recounting of her beloved parents' last days. But there is fun as well, as the original (and most interesting) manic pixie dream girl talks honestly about everything from her great friend Carol Kane to her unrequited love for costar and friend Jack Nicholson.

Above all, Keaton proves herself to be an utter original, a woman who lived by her own terms and her own code of ethics. “I’ve always loved independent women, outspoken women, eccentric women, funny women, flawed women,” she writes in Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty. “When someone says about a woman, ‘I’m sorry, that’s just wrong,’ I tend to think she must be doing something right.”

Picture Perfect

Diane Hall was born on Jan 5, 1946, in Los Angeles, the first child of Dorothy and Jack Hall. In many ways, her parents were opposites: Dorothy (winner of the Mrs. Los Angeles pageant in 1955!) was a sunny optimist, gregarious, artistic and an open-minded Democrat. Jack was an upright, Republican civil engineer who worshipped capitalism and the teachings of Norman Vincent Peale. But both believed in the promise of the American dream, and that they could create an ideal family life.

Their daughter Diane believed this as well. “The utopia Southern California held out to those of us who grew up in the fifties was irresistible,” she writes in Then Again. “We believed happiness would come from owning a Buick station wagon, a speedboat, and a Doughboy swimming pool.”

Three more children quickly followed: Robin, Randy, and Dorrie. Diane was a quirky, sociable tomboy with a natural gift for making people laugh. The Halls spent every spare minute at the beach, where Jack indulged in his love of skin diving. But it was Dorothy whom the children crowded around. Bucking the norms of a diligent SoCal housewife, she was an avid collagist and writer, once driving the children all the way to New York City to see an exhibition at MoMa. When the exhibit inspired Diane to collage her bedroom walls, Dorothy enthusiastically helped; after all she was already collaging the inside of all the kitchen cabinets.

Insecure about her looks and a poor student, a nervous Diane was desperate for attention. “I was looking for an audience,” she writes. “Any audience.” She became an expert debater, took acting lessons and sang in local choirs. When Diane performed a showstopping rendition of “Mata Hari” in a play at Santa Ana High School, even her distant father was awed, and she was hooked on acting for life.

“I could tell he was startled by his awkward daughter—the one who’d flunked algebra, smashed into his new Ford station wagon… and spent a half hour in the bathroom using up a whole can of Helene Curtis hairspray,” she recalls. “For one thrilling moment I was his Seabiscuit, Audrey Hepburn, and Wonder Woman rolled into one. I was Amelia Earhart flying across the Atlantic. I was his heroine.”

The Cheerleader

“Mom continues to be the most important, influential person in my life. From the outside looking in, we lived completely different lives,” Keaton writes in Then Again. “She was a housewife and mother who dreamed of success; I am an actress whose life has been—in some respects—beyond my wildest dreams.”

Then Again is a memoir of both Diane and her striving mother, whose viewpoint is told through dozens of journal entries, letters and scrapbooks. Heartwarming, funny, raw, and at times devastating, it juxtaposes Keaton’s coming of age as an actress in New York City with her own mother’s depression and rage after her children were gone and her identity shattered.

At the age of 19, Keaton (who took her mother’s maiden name because there was already a Diane Hall in the Screen Actor’s Guild) moved to NYC, where she studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse with the “mesmerizing and mean” Sanford Meisner. During her stint as a cast member in Broadway’s Hair, Keaton was in a constant battle with her weight and overheard a cast member talking about throwing up her food. “How disgusting,” she thought. “How awful. How interesting.”

Keaton herself developed a crippling case of bulimia, which blighted many of her early successes—including her breakout role in Woody Allen’s 1969 play, Play it Again Sam. With searing honesty, Keaton describes the rituals and emotions elicited by her eating disorder with egoless bravery. She eventually recovered with the help of therapy, while her mother found new outlets in education, writing and art.

Throughout her life, Dorothy remained her daughter’s biggest cheerleader. Her slow descent into Alzheimer’s is unbearably painful for both Keaton and the reader, who feels like they’ve gotten to know her empathetic, curious soul. “I only wish that once, just once, I had the courage to say what I felt as I averted my eyes and waved goodbye,” Keaton writes. “You see, Mom, it was always you. It was you for as long as long is.”

The Unattainable Greats

“I never found home in the arms of a man,” Keaton writes. Instead, she seems to have had infinitely relatable infatuations with a series of larger-than-life, egotistical stars, men who didn’t have the capacity to meet such a remarkable woman’s needs.

Keaton’s first great love was Woody Allen. She became his muse, and Keaton recalls their “perfect afternoons” spent sitting in Central Park or on the steps of the Met, analyzing everyone they saw.

“We were quite a couple, one more hidden than the other,” Keaton writes. “We both wore hats in public, and he always held, or, rather, gripped my hand without letting go. People were to be avoided. We shared a love of torturing each other with our failures…We thrived on demeaning each other. His insights into my character were dead on and—duh!—hilarious. This bond remains at the core of our friendship and, for me, love.”

Although they broke up two years before Annie Hall was released, they remained staunch friends the rest of Keaton’s life and irrevocably entwined in the public’s imagination. By the time Annie Hall came out, Keaton was already in a relationship with the legendary lothario Warren Beatty.

Keaton was captivated by this complex Hollywood operator, who was “lawyer-smart,” generous, and forever uplifting and encouraging. “Once Warren chose to shine his light on you, there was no going back,” she writes. “Within his gaze I was the most captivating person in the world…It was enchanting, but it was scary too.”

Yet by the time they shot the 1980 opus Reds, Keaton was already wavering. She was never fully secure in their relationship; they broke up soon after. “I wanted to be Warren Beatty,” she writes, “not love him.”

If the reader had to place bets, it would be that her Godfather trilogy co-star Al Pacino was the true love of Keaton’s life. (Pacino, it seems, may have agreed.) “Sometimes I swear Al must have been raised by wolves,” she writes. “There were normal things he had no acquaintance with, like the whole idea of enjoying a meal in the company of others. He was more at home eating alone standing up.” But these eccentricities made Keaton love him all the more. “I was happy to hear him read Macbeth at midnight, just to listen to the sound of his voice,” she writes. “He was crazy. Crazy great.”

Things came to a head during the shooting of 1990’s Godfather III, when she issued Pacino an ultimatum: marry her, or at least think about it. “Poor Al, he never wanted it,” Keaton writes. “Poor me, I never stopped insisting.” The couple finally broke up that year. “He liked plain. I liked him plain,” she notes. “I loved him, but my love was not making me a better person. I hate to say it, but I was not plain. I was too much.”

The Look

An admittedly anxious and insecure person, Keaton agonized about her looks from an early age. As a kid she slept with a bobby pin on the tip of her nose to straighten it, practiced smiles for hours, and did facial exercises in a misguided attempt to strengthen her sloping eyes. Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty is a collection of stream-of conscious essays that meditate on what beauty and style is, and how Keaton unpacked the beauty expectations women face.

Keaton found her fashion idol as a child: Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story. And as she explains, her quirky, menswear-embracing look—which made her a style icon—was largely born out of insecurity. “You could call a good two-thirds of my wardrobe an impenetrable fortress. By this I mean the hats that hide the head, the gloves that hide the fingers, the long-sleeved turtlenecks that hide both the arms and the neck, the leggings that hide the legs, and the boots that hide the feet,” she notes.

For many years, Keaton’s fear of aging kept her from experiencing some of her life's most exciting moments. She recalls her beauty idol Audrey Hepburn effusively praising her at the Oscars after Keaton won for Annie Hall. Instead of relishing the moment, Keaton instead couldn’t get over the fact that 48-year-old Hepburn looked older than Keaton imagined her to be. “Instead of taking the time to have a conversation with Audrey Hepburn, I chose to hightail my way out of her company as fast as I could,” she writes. “It is another regret in a growing list of regrets.”

In her second memoir, Keaton still admits to agonizing over her thinning hair. Yet as she evolved, she also began to see beauty in the talented and brave and unique: in everyone and everything from Lena Dunham to Joan Rivers, Grand Central Station, Abraham Lincoln, darkness, and notes from her children. “I’ve faced the truth,” she writes. “No dream can live up to its expectations. Ownership is brief; in fact, it’s a fiction. And beauty is a discovery that diminishes the truth of reality. So keep looking.”

The Other Side of Normal

“I wanted to write Randy’s story, and my story of being his sister, because there are so many people who live through the sorrow and pain of not knowing how to manage a family member who has a singularly unique view of life: a sibling who doesn’t fit in or follow the paths the rest of us take; who challenges and bewilders, upsets and dazzles us; who scares some of us away; but who still loves us, in his or her way,” Keaton writes in 2020’s Brother and Sister.

As children, Keaton often dismissed her younger brother as a crybaby, scaredy cat and a nuisance who was coddled by their mother. After an early failed marriage and a stint at his father's company, Randy became a recluse – writing dark, brilliant poetry (used to great effect in Brother and Sister), creating art, indulging in violent fantasies against women and drinking himself to death. The riddle of Randy drove his parents to distraction. Jack was exasperated, infuriated and embarrassed, while Dorothy tried desperately to save him.

After her father died, and her mother declined, Keaton and her sisters did everything to help their brother. Keaton even admits to pulling strings so he could get a liver transplant (he almost immediately started drinking again). They eventually placed him in memory care, where every week Keaton would pick him up to get a Foster Freeze ice cream. “Those weekends of looking without agenda gave me a glimpse into the wonder of Randy’s imagination,” she writes. “Welcoming every direction on impulse led us in and out of the perimeters of Burbank. Being with him helped me let go of old habits and tired routines…Randy was giving me a path to new perceptions.”

As Randy’s disease progressed (he died of COVID-related complications in 2020), Keaton finally seems to have come to a separate peace with him. “I’d kiss his forehead, or touch his white hair and pinch his cheeks,” she writes. “After a lifetime of self-imposed barriers, I finally gave myself permission to be close, quiet, and intimate with my brother.”

Late Bloomer

“Warren was right, I was a late developer, but I’d become a woman, despite my protestations, and now a mother too,” Keaton writes. In 1996 at the age of 50, Keaton adopted her daughter, Dexter. “Dexter was my ‘in sickness and health til death do us part’ unconditional love.”

Her son, Duke, was adopted in 2001. Keaton’s wonder and delight in her children is evident in all three memoirs, and she hilariously recounts the travails of being an older, eccentric mom with two lively, very modern children. “Why am I so fortunate?” she writes. “How did these two choices thrust me out of a life of isolation into a kind of family-of-man scenario, complete with an extended family, new friends, and much needed ordinary activities?”

Throughout her books, what sticks out is how little Keaton talks about her career or Hollywood or fame, and how much she talks and knows about the people she loves. “It all boils down to family,” she writes. “One day you end up having spent your life with a handful of people. I have a family—two really. Well, three if you think about it. There are my siblings, there are my children, but I also have an extended family. The people who stayed. The people who became more than friends; the people who open the door when I knock. That is what it all boils down to. The people who have to open the door, not because they always want to but because they do.”

After reading her vibrant, living books, it is impossible to believe Diane Keaton died from pneumonia on Oct. 11, 2025. When describing the death of her own mother to her children in 2008, she told them how miraculous it was that her mother’s eyes, long closed, were now open. “I asked Dexter and Duke if they thought their grandmother might have been seeing something she’d never seen before,” she writes. “They both agreed she must have been looking into something on the other side of new.”