Then Again

Mom loved adages, quotes, slogans. There were always little reminders pasted on the kitchen wall. For example, the word think. I found think thumbtacked on a bulletin board in her darkroom. I saw it Scotch-taped on a pencil box she’d col- laged. I even found a pamphlet titled think on her bedside table. Mom liked to think. In a notebook she wrote, I’m reading Tom Robbins’s book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The passage about marriage ties in with women’s struggle for accomplishment. I’m writing this down for future THINKING . . . She followed with a Robbins quote: “For most poor dumb brainwashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marriage is a matter of efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV . . . off- spring and creature comforts all under one roof. . . . But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight . . . and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bar- gained to ‘take care’ of her. . . . Women live longer than men because they really haven’t been living.” Mom liked to think about life, especially the experience of being a woman. She liked to write about it too.

In the mid-seventies on a visit home, I was printing some photographs I’d taken of Atlantic City in Mother’s darkroom when I found something I’d never seen. It was some kind of, I don’t know, sketchbook. On the cover was a collage she’d made out of family photographs with the words It’s the Journey That Counts, Not the Arrival. I picked it up and flipped through the pages. Although it included several collages made from snapshots and magazine cutouts, it was filled with page after page of writing.

Had a productive day at Hunter’s Bookstore. We re- arranged the art section and discovered many interesting books hidden away. It’s been two weeks since I was hired. I make 3 dollars and thirty-five cents an hour. Today I got paid 89 dollars in total.

This wasn’t one of Mom’s typical scrapbooks, with the usual napkins from Clifton’s Cafeteria, old black-and-white photographs, and my less-than-thrilling report cards. This was a journal.

An entry dated August 2, 1976, read: WATCH OUT ON THIS PAGE. For you, the possible reader in the future, this takes courage. I’m speaking of what is on my mind. I am angry. Target—Jack—bad names, those he has flung at me—NOT forgotten and that is undoubtedly the problem—“You frigin’ bastard”––all said—all felt. God, who the hell does he think he is?

Excerpted from Then Again by Diane Keaton. Copyright © 2011 by Diane Keaton. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.