The power of being yourself and telling your story

Diane Keaton died this week, the latest in a series of my heroes to pass away this year alone (it’s starting to feel like a personal attack at this point). So it felt like a good time to listen to her read her memoir, Then Again.

There’s something very haunting and moving about listening to the voice of someone has just died telling you their life story through a set of headphones, especially when it’s someone like this who can clearly deliver her own words so powerfully, given that she was such a great performer.

Some things I knew I would get from her life story and those are the things I admire the most about Diane Keaton. She was very much her own person, living the life she wanted to live and not conforming to other people’s ideas of what that should be.

Her uncompromising love of - and support for - Woody Allen stands out in this respect. When the public pressure to ‘cancel’ him was at its peak, she put out a simple social media post saying that he was her friend and that she continued to believe him. That took courage because it inevitably lead to a backlash. But she stood up for what she believed in.

Of course, she also did this through her sense of style. One of my favourite things I saw this week was a Vanity Fair cover from 2016, taken by Annie Leibovitz of a collection of Hollywood women over various generations. Needless to say, from Jane Fonda to Viola Davis to Brie Larson to Helen Mirren, they all look traditionally glamorous.

But then you get to the last person in the photo spread and it’s Diane Keaton, wearing her own clothes, covering everything apart from her face, hands and shins and with a trademark hat to top it off. She looked like only she could look and like she belonged in a completely different photo to everyone else.

That’s what I loved about her and it comes through so strongly in this book, which isn’t a traditional Hollywood memoir, but more like a conversation with her mother, told through excerpts of letters, phone messages, journal entries, etc. It’s incredibly honest and frank at times, presenting her mother’s depression and anxieties alongside her own fears and insecurities.

It’s also really moving, ending with her mother’s last days as she faded away into the clouds of dementia, something I know all too well from what happened to my own mother. That gave it a very raw edge for me listening to it less than a year later. But it’s also moving to hear the author confronting mortality just days after she passed away (the book came out 14 years ago).

People’s life stories have so much to tell us if we listen to them, and that’s one of the things I like best about working as a counsellor, it’s getting to share in those stories. I’m grateful that I listened to Then Again this week and I’m grateful that someone like Diane Keaton existed and shared herself with the world.