-
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
Good points, Susannah. At least two more reasons to be outraged by Herman Rosenblat's faked memoir: It can only encourage Holocaust deniers, as Rosenblat's friends and family have pointed out while expressing outrage at him. And it's part of a disturbing pattern of falsity. Misha Defonseca claimed to be a Jewish survivor who lived with wolves in Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years; there were no wolves and she wasn't Jewish. Binjamin Wilkomirski won prizes and comparisons to Primo Levi for Fragments, his account of surviving the camps Majdenau and Birkenau—but he made the whole thing up, down to the last emotionally affecting detail. All of this is slippery exploitation, and irredeemable.
-
sponsorship
Melinda,
Thanks for sharing news of Laura Bush's memoir. I'll admit, I've always liked Laura. I don't think it's fair to project our hopes and dreams onto another woman just because she's married to the president. (Meghan's excellent post about Michelle Obama sums up my feelings well.) Yes, it's a position that offers much power, but if a first lady is not comfortable doing big things in the glare of such a bright spotlight, she's not going to be very good at it. Her more traditional first lady role of working to improve literacy and raising awareness on breast cancer and heart disease might not be world-changing, but it suits her.
As for her book, well, I rarely buy memoirs. I find them generally self-indulgent and not terribly revealing. Did we get all the dirt on Bill and Monica in his memoir? Doubtful. If there's anything to be said about Laura's stated intention to write a book that is "positive ... with a minimum of criticism," it's that, well, the honesty is refreshing. So, no, I won't buy it. The vast majority of the reading I do these days is children's picture books, but, if I have energy enough at the end of the day to do more than curl up with my remote and whatever's on the DVR, I'm going to sit down with a novel. (I figure I'm only two or three years behind on the NYT best-seller list.) Would I love to know what life was like in the White House for Laura, and for George, the last eight years? Sure. But I would never expect it to come from Laura.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?