Brother & Sister
Jesse Stone (Author photograph) New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Format is approximately 5.75 inches by 8.5 inches. Illustrations (some in color). Signed by the author on the title page. Actress Diane Keaton's most recent memoir about her artist brother Randy and his struggle with mental illness and an early descent into alcoholism. Diane Keaton (née Hall, born January 5, 1946) is an American actress and director. She has received various accolades throughout her career spanning over six decades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and the AFI Life Achievement Award. Keaton's career began on stage when she appeared in the original 1968 Broadway production of the musical Hair. The next year she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her performance in Woody Allen's comic play Play it Again, Sam. She then made her screen debut in a small role in Lovers and Other Strangers, before rising to prominence with her first major film role as Kay Adams-Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, a role she reprised in its sequels Part II and Part III. She frequently collaborated with Woody Allen, beginning with the film adaptation of Play It Again, Sam. Her next two films with him, Sleeper and Love and Death, established her as a comic actor, while her fourth, Annie Hall, won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. Keaton appeared in dramatic films, starring in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Interiors. She received three more Academy Award nominations for her roles as activist Louise Bryant in Reds, a patient in Marvin's Room, and a dramatist in Something's Gotta Give. Derived from a Kirkus review: In this melancholic addition to Keaton’s two previous works of memoir, she strives to understand her troubled younger brother. Two poignant passages bookend the author’s brief account of her relationship with her brother, Randy Hall. In the first, she recalls the pair at 5 and 3, sharing a bedroom in their Southern California home, Keaton “glancing down from my top-bunk apartment in the sky and seeing Randy’s anxious bobbing head, his fear of the dark, and his sweet if hapless face….Why couldn’t he stop seeing ghosts lurking in shadows that weren’t there?” The second depicts the siblings, now in their 70s, sitting quietly as Keaton holds her ailing brother’s hand and strokes his hair during a visit to his nursing home. In between these moments of intimacy, Keaton admits to long periods of estrangement from her sensitive, self-destructive, alcoholic brother, who “took failure and wore it the way Hester Pryne wore her scarlet letter,” spending an isolated life writing, collaging, drinking, and existing by grace of the support—financial and otherwise—of his parents and sisters. While never completely free of worry or involvement, the author discloses that “while I was playing the firebrand Louise Bryant, he’d attempted to gas himself in the garage….I told myself I didn’t have time to linger on my family’s problems, and certainly not Randy’s.” Keaton thoughtfully wrestles with her guilty conscience while attempting to assemble a clearer picture of her brother’s nature. To do so, she relies heavily on excerpts from his poems, prose, and letters and those of family members. Yet Hall—described variously as “a schizoid personality” by a doctor, an “Almost Artist” by Keaton, and a “genius” by his idealizing mother—remains inscrutable and difficult to sympathize with. Keaton sheds her whimsical persona to explore difficult burdens that those with an unstable sibling will recognize. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Randy Hall, Siblings, Substance Abuse, Alcoholism, Artist, Poet, Relationships, Family, Writer, Actor, Actress, Self-destruction, Scizoid, Estrangement
ISBN: 9780451494504
[Book #84968]
Price: $125.00