A man is "a huge part of life that's missing, yeah, but I don't miss it," Diane Keaton says in a frank, funny and fearless cover story in the November 2009 issue of MORE. She calls her independence "wonderful. I’m free to do what I want to try to do. I don’t have to worry that I’m not living up to some responsibility as a partner to somebody else.”
Instead, Keaton's energies are focused on her work, of which there is plenty. She has just finished a new film with Harrison Ford, she's signed for an HBO series, and she's writing a memoir about herself and her mother, drawing from scores of notebooks her mother kept. "My mother had that fantasy of more, a bigger life, expressing herself," Keaton tells Johanna Schneller. "You don't write all that unless you need to get the story of your life out. You're saying, 'I'm here. I want to express what it meant to me.’ ”
Her children are also paramount, and for the first time, Keaton is photographed in MORE with her kids, whom she adopted: daughter Dexter, 13, and son Duke, 8. "I don't really relax much," Keaton says. "I can’t go and nap, ever. I’m not interested in relaxing until I hit the sack, and then it’s like [crash noise]. I wouldn’t know what to do with a week off. Except for one little area, m-e-n, I’m excited, I’m ready to go, sign me up.”
Even though Keaton shined in one of the best midlife romances ever, Something's Gotta Give, she now says matter-of-factly, “I don’t think men even look at me anymore. If anything could work in that area, it would probably be if I paid him. Then I think we could work out an affable relationship. ‘Remember, at eight we’re going to dinner. Until then, you’re free, take care of yourself.’ ” She grins; she’s joking, of course, though so seamlessly that she had you for a second. “I’m totally for it! I pay for everything else.” She snorts at herself. “I bet I’ll have a lot of suitors now, right?”
For much more from Keaton—on playing opposite Harrison Ford in the upcoming comedy Morning Glory, on what she's learning about herself from her memoir-writing, and on what she admires about today's rising actresses—read the full story in the November issue of MORE, on newsstands October 27.
Click here for a web extra: Keaton's comments on key moments with her costars, from Warren to Meryl.
