Diane and Penelope

At the end of Diane Keaton's memoir, Then Again, she writes about her lifelong search to understand the meaning of love and about the awfulness of her mother's loss of memory.  Three men have figured in her life: Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, and Al Pacino--though you can feel her insecurity in her relationships with all of them.

"Maybe I wasn't pretty enough for Al [Pacino].  Maybe Al, like Ronnie...back in high school, wasn't attracted to my face.  My face was my failure."

She's insecure about her looks, but she seems to value ideas and change over her appearance.

"If I wanted to be pretty I could put in an order for a face-lift, with an eye job on the side....But why start experimenting?  And besides, pretty, with its promise of perfection, is not as appealing as it used to be. It's the death of creativity, that's what I think, while change, on the other hand, is the cornerstone of new ideas.  God knows, I want new ideas and experiences."

I'm reminded of a magnet on the refrigerator that someone gave me when I was 50ish: "Change how you look, not how you see."

Diane did a brave thing--adopting two children as a single mother, the first when she was fifty.  In the interview with Anna Quindlen after the Afterword, the two mothers talk about how their children "saved" them--from themselves.

Then Again is the most rambling autobiography I've ever read--but in the end, I felt like I could invite Diane over and we could be friends.  Don't we all like people who are at least a tiny bit neurotic?  Her book was more like the collages her mother made (great pictures of them after the Afterword and before the interview) than a well-crafted memoir, I thought--but in the end I liked it for (or in spite of) its randomness. It was more like a very long email from a friend than a memoir.

Last night on Fresh Air, Terry interviewed Penelope Lively--a prize winning author of so many novels it makes my head spin.  At eighty, Penelope has written a memoir which she calls "a view from old age."  I read the sample on Kindle last night and will definitely download the entire book and read it before I say more--but the interview with Penelope Lively was lively and intriguing.  Her memoir is called Dancing Fish and Amonites. Here is a link to the Fresh Air interview:

http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/

When her parents divorced, her mother didn't want custody of her child, so Penelope was raised by two grandmothers.  It was interesting to hear about her take on childhood, parenting, marriage, feminism, writing, and motherhood.