Are you ready for your mind to be blown? Seriously, like, zillion-caliber blown? OK, here goes: Diane Keaton, during her bulimia days, used to take in twenty thousand calories in one day. 20,000! In ONE DAY! My God!
Here are some excerpts from her upcoming book, Then Again: A Memoir, courtesy of the Daily Mail.
On bingeing and purging those calories away:
For breakfast each day, she’d shovel down a dozen buttered corn muffins, three fried eggs with bacon, pancakes and four glasses of chocolate milk. For lunch: three buttered steaks with charbroiled fat on the side, two-and-a-half baked potatoes with sour cream, apple pie and two chocolate sundaes with extra nuts. Dinner almost defied belief: a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, several orders of chips with blue cheese and ketchup, a couple of TV dinners, chocolate-covered almonds, a large bottle of 7Up, a pound of peanut brittle, M&Ms, mango juice, one Sara Lee pound cake, and three frozen banana-cream pies.
On learning to dislike her looks from a young age:
Her body, she was dismayed to discover, looked big in the bathtub and her features failed to measure up to those of Audrey Hepburn, the radiant subject of a feature in Life magazine. To help matters along, Diane slept with a hair-grip on her nose, hoping to reshape it into a straight line.
The side effects from bulimia:
Eating and purging around 20,000 calories a day gave Diane heartburn, indigestion, irregular periods, low blood pressure and 26 cavities in her teeth.
Dating Al Pacino and trying to force him into marriage:
In 1990, when they flew to Rome to start filming Godfather III, she gave him an ultimatum: ‘Marry me, or at least commit to the possibility.’ Clearly, his response was not what she’d hoped for: they broke up, got together again and went on to have another ‘dozen’ break-ups.
‘Poor Al. Poor me — I never stopped insisting,’ she says. When they returned to the U.S., though, a family crisis drove even Al Pacino from her mind. Her father was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and died five months later. Diane was distraught. Two months after her father’s death, she was sitting in a therapist’s office with Al when he announced that he’d never had any intention of marrying her and wanted to split for good. She watched him walk away without a backward glance.
And her true feelings about Woody Allen after all this time:
“I miss Woody. He’d cringe if he knew how much I care about him, but I’m smart enough not to broach the subject. I know he’s borderline repulsed by the grotesque nature of my affection. What am I supposed to do? I still love him.”
Damn. Talk about one intense lady. I admire her candor and her honesty, and in all truthfulness, I think I’d actually read this book. It sounds fascinating, and her self-awareness is kind of stark and appealing.
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