Diane Keaton shares stories of love and pain in 'Brother & Sister'

Back in the 1970s and '80s, while Diane Keaton was jet-setting around the world, collecting awards and establishing herself as America's favorite on-screen eccentric, the actual eccentric in her family, her younger brother, Randy, was living in squalor in Orange County, California, being terrorized by low-flying jets and attempting to gas himself in the garage.

She couldn't really be bothered to check in on him, never mind try to help.

"I wanted to be a movie star," she writes in her memoir "Brother & Sister" (Knopf, $25.95). "I wanted people — lots of people I didn't know — to love me."

"Brother & Sister" is a reconstruction of their lives from their childhood to the darkness that followed Randy into adulthood, which included alcoholism, joblessness, divorce, isolation, fantasies about violence against women and a suicide attempt. The story is told through journal entries by Randy and their mother, along with Keaton's recollections. The sister rises ever higher. The brother sinks ever lower.

Relatability is a goal. She knows her story — their story — is unusual: her extreme success and fame, his extreme psychological turmoil. But she said she hopes readers will still see something of themselves in it, of the challenging relationships they have within their own families.

"There are so many people who live through the pain of having a family member who doesn't quite fit in," she told a crowd at a recent book event in Washington, D.C. She said she wanted to open up a dialogue about mental health and to offer herself up as a cautionary tale that could inspire people to "be better" to their loved ones sooner than she had.

The final chapters of Keaton's book are as much a love letter to her brother as they are an apology. She is sorry for abandoning him, grateful she got him back. Over the past 12 years, as dementia softened Randy's resistance to his family and age tempered Keaton's blinding ambition, the two began spending time together.

Every Sunday she visits. Before he was in a wheelchair, they'd take walks to get ice cream; now, she and an aide push him along. "He would see something — find a leaf or even a bottle cap — and find it fascinating," she told The Washington Post in an interview. "All I remember about that was how special those times were with him. It was like opening something up to me. Giving me such a gift."

Keaton wanted to return the gift by sharing those softer parts of her brother with the world. Part of her motivation in putting together the book, she said, was to give Randy's poetry an audience. Maybe it would catch an editor's attention. "At some point," Keaton mused, "maybe someone will come and look at his writing and really take it and see what they feel he did with it."

Maybe the sister could help the brother get some love and attention for himself, belatedly.

Like many loving gifts, it might reflect her own tastes more than his: Randy never sought fame or recognition. In the book, she recalls him once telling her, "I still believe a small, personal life can produce heroes."