The cover of Diane Keaton's memoir, Then Again

Mother’s Day is coming up this Sunday, and rather than just do brunch (like you’ve done every year for the past decade), why not reflect on what makes your mom tick, and take some time to get to know her? That’s the subject of this week’s “Sense and the City,” out in print in today’s Ticket.

Here’s a sample:

Actress Diane Keaton focuses much of her new memoir, “Then Again,” on her mom — helped by having access to 85 volumes of diaries her mother wrote over the course of her life. The journals contained thousands of pages of her mother’s most private thoughts about herself, her children, her marriage. I don’t know if Keaton knew her mom all that well while she was alive, but she sure gained entirely new and perhaps sometimes shocking insights into her mother after her death through these journals.

In this day of electronic correspondence and Facebook, fewer and fewer people are keeping journals, much less busy moms who nowadays even keep their grocery lists on their smart phones.

The roles moms play, though — as breadwinners, carpoolers, laundresses, housecleaners, homework-helpers, grocery-getters, button-sewers, advice-givers — haven’t changed much, and those busy duties make it even harder to get to know them. Unfortunately, many children take it for granted that they know all there is to know about their moms.

After all, “Mom” encompasses everything. For most kids, the concept of “Mom” is that of a bottomless pit. Everything goes in — every desire, want, need, curiosity, whim, joy, heartache, drama, catastrophe and success is poured in — but not much about Mom ever gets to come out.

How can it? They’ve got to attend to your needs first.

For the rest, head over to the Ticket website.