Keaton is certain that her mother had artistic ambitions of her own, however quiet or unrealized. Dorothy was an obsessive journal keeper, cramming scores of brick-thick notebooks with thoughts, photographs, doodles and collages. “My mother had that fantasy of more, a bigger life, expressing herself,” Keaton says. “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.’ ”
For the memoir, which will be published by Random House, Keaton is combining excerpts from those diaries with stories from her own life. “It’s not so easy!” she says. “But I’m sending in little chapters to my editor. There’s a sweet section where Mother is reflecting on her childhood, then I reflect on mine, on who we were and what that meant. There was my father’s death—what it was for my mother, what it was for me, what it meant about my relationship to men. It’s been really interesting for me.”
This intimate access to her mother’s mind has made Keaton aware of how little she knew her father and how little she understands men in general. “My mother wrote reams, but from Dad, we got nothing—a couple of letters,” she says. “I’d read into those small messages sent from my father’s brain to me. He’s much more of a mystery.” She pauses. “All men are. Mm-hmm.”
Although Keaton has never married, she has dated some complicated men, including Woody Allen, Warren Beatty and Al Pacino. But she swears that there is no man in her life now (her ex-act words are, “No, oh-ho, none”), and that she can’t imagine one in her future. “It’s a huge part of life that’s missing, yeah, but I don’t miss it,” she says. The very idea of couples falling in love later in life—so memorably portrayed in Something’s Gotta Give—makes her explode with questions: “Do you think they kiss?” she squeals. “They have sex? That’s something I can’t imagine at all. For me it was always, ‘Oh, no!’ ” She mimes backing away, waggling her hands. “And then I couldn’t help myself, because just, biologically, you can’t help but go toward it. It’s too exciting.” She shakes her head. “Ugh! I don’t want that excitement. Too scary. I see it as a danger zone. Who would we become, together? I just . . . unnnh.”
