Few celebrities of Allen’s stature carry quite such heavy baggage, yet in his case the two things everyone knows and despises about him (that he molested one daughter and married another) are completely false. He didn’t molest his daughter Dylan when she was seven (new details he provides in the book at great length make it more obvious than ever that he was smeared).
And as for Soon-Yi, the adopted daughter of his longtime girlfriend Mia Farrow (with whom he never shared a residence), far from taking advantage of the girl, he and she turned out to be the love of each other’s life, a life in which she is the controlling partner and has been for nearly 30 years. Allen is now a semi-pariah; the role rather suits him. Life with him has been a Kafkaesque experience. Kafka for the age of red carpets, anyway: One of the actors he directed, Timothée Chalamet, publicly denounced him in 2018 but told Allen’s sister and producer, Letty Aronson, that he did so in order to boost his chances of winning the Oscar he was then campaigning for, according to Allen.
Reversing the usual habit of the memoirist, Allen downplays youthful hardships. Despite getting hit every day by his mother and once by his father (“a gentle tap across my face that gave me an unimpeded view of the Aurora Borealis”), he says he received nothing but adoration and cosseting from his working-class Brooklyn family. Yet “along with all of the love I was shown growing up, I still experienced some moderate feelings of anxiety — like when you’re buried alive.” Despair is always available for a punchline: “I never agreed to be finite.” Even as Allen aches for meaning, though, he chafes at his own pretensions, heckles himself whenever he puts on airs. “Like Bertrand Russell, I feel a great sadness for the human race. Unlike Bertrand Russell, I can’t do long division.”
Even while expending 70 frustrated pages on the Mia–Soon-Yi saga, Allen keeps the wit flowing. He then returns implacably to praising Farrow’s acting in such films as September (1987) while ridiculing himself for making “a drama that asks the question: Can a group of tortured souls come to terms with their sad lives when directed by a guy who should still be writing mother-in-law jokes for Broadway columnists?”
These days Soon-Yi, who ran away from her mother at age five and survived on the streets by herself for some time before being taken up at a Catholic orphanage, runs him like a machine. She once told him her goal in life was “to be the boss,” and he is the one taking her orders as she makes all major household financial, social, and parenting choices. His devotion to her is total. She is the one who changes the ribbon on the Olympia typewriter he still uses, being ill-acquainted with computers, the Internet, the century. “I couldn’t last a week in a concentration camp without my Buf-Puf,” he writes. “Soon-Yi, on the other hand, after two days would have the Gestapo bringing her breakfast in bed.”
Looking ahead to the future (at 84, he says, “My life is almost half over”), Allen figures to continue vexing his many haters. He had difficulty assembling a cast for his latest movie, but it’s now in the can, and even if he couldn’t make movies, he’d write plays. If no one would produce his plays, he’d write books. If no one would publish the books now, he’d write them for later. The image comes to mind of Allen’s Bananas hero Fielding Mellish, representing himself in a treason trial, getting bound and gagged by the judge, but continuing to speak (and reduce a witness to tears). Sorry, you there with the pitchforks and the torches, despite putting him through (Bananas again) a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham, Allen still doesn’t care what you think of him, and he’s going to keep creating till he drops. “If I died right now I couldn’t complain,” he says. “And neither would a lot of other people.”