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    The Memoir We'd Love To Read

    Posted Thursday, February 12, 2009 5:55 PM | By Bonnie Goldstein
    I agree with Emily 100 percent about Diane Keaton's $2 million book deal. Maybe her Random House editors can persuade her to write a Hollywood memoir and give those 90 diaries her mother kept, the ones "chronicling the upbringing of her children and her frustrating marriage," a rest. The New York Times reported that Keaton read the journals aloud to her mother during the final years of Dorothy Keaton Hall's battle with Alzheimer's. I imagine her work on this book, which Keaton started last year after Hall succumbed to her illness, must be therapeutic but nevertheless quite painful. I shudder at the thought of my daughter exhuming my spent life out of hundreds of notebooks, particularly if I had had the poor luck to leave the building early.

    As an aside, if I do lose ability to remember who I used to be, I hope I do so as elegantly as the Alzheimer's patient in the 2007 film Away From Her played by Julie Christie (coincidently also once romantically linked with Warren Beatty). For obsessed boomers, Christie's character is a role model for going gaga gracefully.  

    Getting back to Diane Keaton, Jessica is quite right the Academy Award-winning movie star has a platform of readers no matter what her topic. If she must pay tribute to her mother, we all understand where she's coming from. But let's hear how mom let her audition for the Broadway rock musical Hair, only insisted her daughter keep her clothes on, or maybe write Hall's observations about her daughter's ex-boyfriend and frequent co-star who later settled down with his teenage stepdaughter. 

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