-
sponsorship
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.
-
sponsorship
Emily, I don't think that a memoir of Diane Keaton's relationship to her dementia-suffering mother is what readers of any age necessarily want. I think publishers are grasping at straws in this economy and are willing to publish anything with a celebrity name attached. The common wisdom is probably that a book by Diane Keaton on any subject—from Alzheimer's to zoology—will sell more than the latest literary tome from Richard Ford or any similarly revered author.
With news yesterday that HarperCollins is cutting staff and offering buyouts, after a winter of similarly depressing news from other publishing houses, people are getting desperate to sell books. Which might explain the just-announced book deal for Alexandra Penney, the former Self editor who lost a ton of money with Madoff and then complained about having to lay off her maid, Yolanda, and take the subway in a much-reviled story in the Daily Beast. As Hamilton Nolan at Gawker puts it, " 'Notorious' is the new 'Deserving.' " It remains to be seen whether or not this attitude will save the publishing industry, but I guess at this point anything is worth a shot.
-
sponsorship
Diane Keaton has just sold her memoir for a reported $2 million. You'd think getting the dish about her famous affairs with Woody Allen, Al Pacino, etc., would be worth the publishing world's bidding war even in these strapped days. But the subject of her memoir is how she cared for her late mother during her 15 years with Alzheimer's disease. I know these are depressing times and all, and we boomers have become obsessed with the sense that if we're lucky we might make it to the end of the month without going completely gaga. But now it's come to this: What we want from Diane Keaton is the story of how she lovingly attended to her mother's bodily needs, rather than how Warren Beatty lovingly attended to hers.