Then Again - Couverture souple

Keaton, Diane

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0812980956 ISBN 13 : 9780812980950

Editeur : Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2012

Synopsis

Book by Keaton Diane

A propos du livre

Extrait :

THINK

Mom loved adages, quotes, slogans. There were always little reminders pasted on the kitchen wall. For example, the word think. I found think thumbtacked on a bulletin board in her darkroom. I saw it Scotch-taped on a pencil box she’d col- laged. I even found a pamphlet titled think on her bedside table. Mom liked to think. In a notebook she wrote, I’m reading Tom Robbins’s book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The passage about marriage ties in with women’s struggle for accomplishment. I’m writing this down for future THINKING . . . She followed with a Robbins quote: “For most poor dumb brainwashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV . . . off- spring and creature comforts all under one roof. . . . But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight . . . and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bar- gained to ‘take care’ of her. . . . Women live longer than men because they really haven’t been living.” Mom liked to think about life, especially the experience of being a woman. She liked to write about it too.

In the mid-seventies on a visit home, I was printing some photographs I’d taken of Atlantic City in Mother’s darkroom when I found something I’d never seen. It was some kind of, I don’t know, sketchbook. On the cover was a collage she’d made out of family photographs with the words It’s the Journey That Counts, Not the Arrival. I picked it up and flipped through the pages. Although it included several collages made from snapshots and magazine cutouts, it was filled with page after page of writing.

Had a productive day at Hunter’s Bookstore. We re- arranged the art section and discovered many interesting books hidden away. It’s been two weeks since I was hired. I make 3 dollars and thirty-five cents an hour. Today I got paid 89 dollars in total.

This wasn’t one of Mom’s typical scrapbooks, with the usual napkins from Clifton’s Cafeteria, old black-and-white photographs, and my less-than-thrilling report cards. This was a journal.

An entry dated August 2, 1976, read: WATCH OUT ON THIS PAGE. For you, the possible reader in the future, this takes courage. I’m speaking of what is on my mind. I am angry. Target—Jack—bad names, those he has flung at me—NOT forgotten and that is undoubtedly the problem—“You frigin’ bastard”––all said—all felt. God, who the hell does he think he is?

That was it for me. This was raw, too raw. I didn’t want to know about an aspect of Mother and Father’s life that could shatter my perception of their love. I put it down, walked out of the darkroom, and did not open another one of her eighty-five journals until she died some thirty years later. But, of course, no matter how hard I tried to deny their presence, I couldn’t help but see them resting on bookshelves, or placed underneath the telephone, or even staring up at me from inside a kitchen drawer. One time I began looking through Mom’s new Georgia O’Keeffe One Hundred Flowers picture book on the coffee table, only to find a journal titled Who Says You Haven’t Got a Chance? lying underneath. It was as if they were conspiring, “Pick us up, Diane. Pick us up.” Forget it. There was no way I was going to go through that experience again. But I was impressed with Mom’s tenacity. How could she keep writing without an audience, not even her own family? She just did.

She wrote about going back to school at age forty. She wrote about being a teacher. She wrote about every stray cat she rescued. When her sister Marti got skin cancer and lost most of her nose, she wrote about that too. She wrote about her frustrations with aging. When Dad got sick in 1990, her journal raged at the injustice of the cancer that attacked his brain. The documentation of his passing proved to be some of Mom’s finest reporting. It was as if taking care of Jack made her love him in a way that helped her become the person she always wished she could have been.

I was trying to get Jack to eat today. But he couldn’t. After a while, I took off my glasses. I put my head close to his, and I told him, I whispered to him, that I missed him. I started to cry. I didn’t want him to see, so I turned my head away. And Jack, with what little strength remained in that damn body of his, took a napkin from my pocket and slowly, as with everything he did, slowly, so slowly, he looked at me with those piercing blue eyes and wiped the tears away from my face. “We’ll make it through this, Doro- thy.”

He didn’t. In the end, Mom took care of Dad, just as she had taken care of Randy, Robin, Dorrie, and me—all our lives. But who was there for her when she wrote in a shaky hand: June 1993. This is the day I heard I have the beginning of Alzheimer’s disease. Scary. Thus began a fifteen-year battle against the loss of memory.

She kept writing. When she could no longer write paragraphs, she wrote sentences like Would we hurt each other less if we touched each other more? and Honor thyself. And short questions and statements like Quick. What’s today’s date? Or odd things like My head is taking a turn. When she couldn’t write sentences, she wrote words: RENT. CALL. FLOWERS. CAR. And even her favorite word, THINK. When she ran out of words, she wrote numbers, until she couldn’t write anymore.

Dorothy Deanne Keaton was born in Winfield, Kansas, in 1921. Her parents, Beulah and Roy, drifted into California before she was three. They were heartlanders in search of the big dream. It dumped them into the hills of Pasadena. Mom played the piano and sang in a trio called Two Dots and a Dash at her high school. She was sixteen when her father drove off, leaving Beulah and her three daughters to fend for themselves. It was hard times for the Keaton girls in the late thirties. Beulah, who’d never worked a day in her life, had to find a job. Dorothy gave up her college dreams in order to help around the house until Beulah finally found work as a janitor.

I have a photograph of sixteen-year-old Dorothy standing next to her father, Roy Keaton. Why did he leave his favorite daughter, his look-alike; why? How could he have driven away knowing he would forever break some part of her heart?

Everything changed when Dorothy met Jack Hall on a basketball court at Los Angeles Pacific College in Highland Park. Mom loved to recall how this handsome black-haired, blue-eyed young man had come to meet her sister Martha but only had eyes for her. She would laugh and say, “It was love at first sight.” And it must have been, because not long after that, they eloped in Las Vegas at the Stardust Hotel.

Mother never told me of her dreams for herself. There were hints though. She was president of the PTA as well as the Arroyo Vista Ladies Club. She was a Sunday-school teacher at our Free Methodist church. She entered every con- test on the back of every cereal box. She loved game shows. Our favorite was Queen for a Day, emceed by Jack Bailey, who began each episode, five days a week, with “Would YOU like to be . . . QUEEN . . . FOR . . . A . . . DAY?” The game went like this: Bailey interviewed four women; whoever was in the worst shape—assessed by the audience applause meter—was crowned Queen for a Day. With “Pomp and Circumstance” playing, he would wrap the winner in a velvet cape with a white fur collar, place a sparkling tiara on her head, and give her four dozen red coronation roses fromCarl’s of Hollywood. Mom and Auntie Martha wrote their sad stories on the application sheet more than once. She almost made the cut when she wrote, “My husband needs a lung.” When pressed for details, Mom told the truth—well, sort of. Jack Hall, an ardent skin diver, needed to dive deeper in order to put more food on his family’s plates. Mom was eliminated.

One morning I woke up to a group of strangers walking around our house examining every room. Mom hadn’t bothered to tell us she had entered the Mrs. America contest at our local level. Mrs. America was a pageant devoted to finding the ideal homemaker. Later she informed us kids it was a competition of skills that included table-setting, floral-arranging, bed-making, and cooking, as well as managing the family budget and excelling in personal grooming. All we could think was WOW.

I was nine, so that made me old enough to sit in the audience of the movie theater on Figueroa Street when she was crowned Mrs. Highland Park. Suddenly my mother, the new greatest homemaker in Highland Park, stood high above me on a vast stage in front of a huge red velvet curtain. When the drapery opened to reveal an RCA Victor Shelby television, a Philco washer and dryer, a set of Samsonite luggage, a fashion wardrobe from Ivers Department Store, and six cobalt-blue flasks filled with Evening in Paris perfume, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. What was I seeing? Why was Mom standing in the spotlight like she was some sort of movie star? This was terribly exciting yet extremely unpleasant at the same time. Something had happened, a kind of betrayal. Mom had abandoned me, but, even worse, much worse, I secretly wished it would have been me on that stage, not her.

Six months later Dorothy Hall was crowned again, this time as Mrs. Los Angeles by Art Linkletter at the Ambassador Hotel. My brother, Randy, and I watched on the new RCA Victor Shelby television. Her duties as Mrs. Los Angeles included making local appearances at supermarkets, department stores, and ladies’ clubs all over Los Angeles County. She wasn’t home much, and when she was, she was busy baking the same German chocolate cake with walnuts over and over, in hopes she would be crowned Mrs. California. Dad got sick of the whole ordeal and made it known. When she lost the coveted title of Mrs. California, she appeared to accept her failure as easily as she resumed her normal household duties, but things were different, at least for me.

Sometimes I wonder how our lives might have changed if Mother had been chosen Mrs. America. Would she have become a TV personality like Bess Myerson, or a spokesperson for Philco appliances, or a columnist for McCall’s magazine? What would have happened to my dreams of being in the spotlight if hers had been realized? Another mother took her opportunity away, but I didn’t care; I was glad I didn’t have to share her with a larger world.

Mom believed her kids would have brilliant futures. After all, I was funny. Randy wrote poems. Robin sang, and Dorrie was smart. By the time I was in junior high school, enough C-minuses had accumulated to prove I wasn’t going to be a student with a brilliant future. Like the rest of the nation, I was tested for my intelligence in 1957. The results were not surprising. There was one exception, something called Abstract Reasoning. I couldn’t wait to run home and tell Mom about this Abstract Reasoning thing. What was it? Excited by any accomplishment, she told me abstract reasoning was the ability to analyze information and solve problems on a complex, thought-based level. No matter how hard I’ve tried to figure out answers to problems by thinking them through, I still don’t exactly understand what abstract reasoning means.

In 1959 our family’s cultural outlook changed when the Bastendorfs moved next door. Bill was a psychologist, with a PhD. Dad, in particular, didn’t trust “headshrinkers.” But he couldn’t help liking Bill and his wife, Laurel, who caused a stir in the community because they let their children run around naked. On our street of look-alike tract homes framed with nicely mowed lawns, the neighbors did not take to the Bastendorfs’ jungle or their walls filled with posters of works by Picasso and Braque and Miró too. Sometimes Laurel would drive Mom to the only beatnik café in Santa Ana. Once there, they drank espresso coffee and talked about the latest Sunset magazine article on trendsetters like Charles Eames or Cliff May—something like that. All I know is, Mom ate it up, especially when Laurel showed her how to make shellboards. She was so inspired, she created her own hybrid—the Rockboard. Soon they were all over our house. The one I remember most was at least three by five feet and weighed so much that some of the rocks started to fall off.

Even though most people saw Dorothy as a housewife, I saw an artist struggling to find a medium.

Inspired by the Bastendorfs’ example, in 1961 Mom piled us kids into the family station wagon and drove all the way to New York City to see the Art of Assemblage exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. We were bowled over by Joseph Cornell and how he navigated an imaginary world through his boxes and collages. As soon as we got home, I decided to collage my entire bedroom wall. Mom was way into it, adding pictures from magazines she thought I might like, such as James Dean standing in Times Square. Soon she was collaging almost anything, including collage trash cans and collage storage boxes made with lumpy papier-mâché; she even collaged the inside of all the kitchen cabinets. (Don’t ask.) Randy took it to a new level by becoming an actual collage artist. Even today, literally hundreds of his current series, “Stymied by a Woman’s Face,” are stacked in the oven, where he claims they’re safe. I guess you could say collecting and reworking images, reorganizing the familiar into unexpected patterns in hopes of discovering something new, became one of our shared beliefs. Collage, like abstract reasoning, was a visual process for analyzing information. “Right?” as I always asked Mom when I was young. For sure she thought I was right.

I was fourteen when I started lugging around a memory I’ll never let go. Mom and Dad were dancing in the moonlight on a hill in Ensenada, Mexico. A mariachi band played. I watched from the sidelines, as they kissed with a depth of feeling that should have been embarrassing for a teenage daughter. Instead, it filled me with awe. It even gave me something else to believe in. Their love. By lodging myself in the arms of Mother and Father’s romance, I knew there would be no goodbyes.

On the last page of my teenage diary, I wrote: “To whom it may concern. When I get married I want my husband and I to talk serious matters over together. No emotional breakdowns in front of the kids. No swearing. I don’t want my husband to smoke, but he can enjoy a good drink now and then. I want my children to go to Sunday school every Sunday. They will also get spankings, since I believe in them. In fact, I want my husband and I to run the household the same way Mom and Dad do right now.”

“To whom it may concern”? Who was I kidding? And why was I trying to be such a good girl when what I really felt had nothing to do with pretend rules on a subject I was terrified of? This is what I didn’t write down but have never forgotten. Dave Garland and I were passing notes in Mrs. Hopkins’s ninth-grade algebra class one day. Dave was “really neat,” but he “couldn’t stand me.” He ended our exchange with six words: “You’ll make a good wife someday.” A wife? I didn’t want to be a wife. I wanted to be a hot date, someone to make out wit...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

The trade paperback edition of Diane Keaton’s unforgettable memoir includes a new Afterword about the bonds between mother and daughter.

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
Janet Maslin, The New York Times • People • Vogue
 
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
—Financial Times • Chicago Sun-Times
The Independent • Bookreporter
The Sunday Business Post

Mom loved adages, quotes, slogans. There were always little reminders pasted on the kitchen wall. For example, the word THINK. I found THINK thumbtacked on a bulletin board in her darkroom. I saw it Scotch-taped on a pencil box she’d collaged. I even found a pamphlet titled THINK on her bedside table. Mom liked to THINK.
 
So begins Diane Keaton’s unforgettable memoir about her mother and herself. In it you will meet the woman known to tens of millions as Annie Hall, but you will also meet, and fall in love with, her mother, the loving, complicated, always-thinking Dorothy Hall. To write about herself, Diane realized she had to write about her mother, too, and how their bond came to define both their lives. In a remarkable act of creation, Diane not only reveals herself to us, she also lets us meet in intimate detail her mother. Over the course of her life, Dorothy kept eighty-five journals—literally thousands of pages—in which she wrote about her marriage, her children, and, most probingly, herself. Dorothy also recorded memorable stories about Diane’s grandparents. Diane has sorted through these pages to paint an unflinching portrait of her mother—a woman restless with intellectual and creative energy, struggling to find an outlet for her talents—as well as her entire family, recounting a story that spans four generations and nearly a hundred years.
 
More than the autobiography of a legendary actress, Then Again is a book about a very American family with very American dreams. Diane will remind you of yourself, and her bonds with her family will remind you of your own relationships with those you love the most.
 
Look for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Date d'édition: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0812980956
• ISBN 13: 9780812980950
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 336