Her Brother’s Keeper

In mid-20th-century Southern California, Dorothy Hall kept records of her family—her husband and “four drifty children.” She tracked them in her diary and in rolls of Kodak film. She made scrapbooks in which she constructed, out of her memories, a story as sunny, she hoped, as its West Coast setting.

After Hall’s death in 2008, her daughter, the actor Diane Keaton, became the family documentarian. She acquired her mother’s 32 journals, 15 scrapbooks, 20 photo albums, and hundreds of letters. She would also absorb her. “Or at least try to understand the complexity of loving someone so different.”