Notes on a Life

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by Eleanor Coppola

Type: Stories
Subject: Director > Francis Ford Coppola
Keywords: Francis Ford Coppola
Publishing date: 2008
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 304 pages
6 ½ x 9 ½ inches (16.5 x 24 cm)

ISBN

978-0-385-52499-5

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Book Presentation:
Eleanor Coppola shares her extraordinary life as an artist, filmmaker, wife, and mother in a book that captures the glamour and grit of Hollywood and reveals the private tragedies and joys that tested and strengthened her over the past twenty years.

Her first book, Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now,was hailed as “one of the most revealing of all first hand looks at the movies” (Los Angeles Herald Examiner). And now the author brings the same honesty, insight, and wit to this absorbing account of the next chapters in her life.

In this new work we travel back and forth with her from the swirling center of the film world to the intimate heart of her family. She offers a fascinating look at the vision that drives her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, and describes her daughter Sofia’s rise to fame with the film Lost in Translation. Even as she visits faraway movie sets and attends parties, she is pulled back to pursue her own art, but is always focused on keeping her family safe. The death of their son Gio in a boating accident in 1986 and her struggle to cope with her grief and anger leads to a moving exploration of her deepest feelings as a woman and a mother.

Written with a quiet strength, Eleanor Coppola’s powerful portrait of the conflicting demands of family, love and art is at once very personal and universally resonant.

About the Author:
ELEANOR COPPOLA is an artist, documentary filmmaker and the author of Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now. She lives in Napa Valley, California.

Press Reviews:
"Winning and quietly provocative."
–New York Times Book Review

"Notes on the Making of ‘Apocalypse Now,' Eleanor Coppola's 1979 production diary of husband Francis' audacious, flawed film released that year, remains one of the best accounts ever written of the insane difficulties involved in shooting a big-budget movie on location. Nearly 30 years later, she brings the same scrupulous honesty and lucid, thoughtful prose to her memoir Notes on a Life.

Ranging episodically over several decades, Coppola offers a poignant self-portrait of middle age.... The author could have come off as an overprivileged whiner as she describes jaunts to Brazil, Thailand and Bali, a cruise of the Caribbean in George Lucas' chartered yacht, the Coppolas' apartment at the Sherry-Netherland in New York and their mansion in the Napa Valley. But her detailed evocations of such lavish scenes are coupled with an awareness of how rarefied they are….

Like many women of her generation, she pushed aside many of her aspirations when she married and had children. The difference is that she didn't marry a guy with an ordinary job, she married a man who turned out to be one of America's greatest film directors. Francis Ford Coppola is, not surprisingly, the elephant in the room in his wife's memoir, which is a three-dimensional portrait of a marriage unlike any other, and yet not so very different after all….

The fact that she generally was an onlooker rather than a participant in this world was her choice, Coppola acknowledges in this nuanced assessment of her life. Her mature understanding illuminates this engaging memoir, which chronicles with equal acuity regrets over the paths not taken and pleasure in the ones that were."
–Los Angeles Times

"[An] affecting memoir.... Eleanor is the glue that holds her family together, yet the tone of this memoir is always self-effacing, reticent, reserved…. Eleanor quietly stands at the ready, watching for opportunities both to help and to make art, giving an entirely different meaning to that old poetic line: ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’"
–Carolyn See, The Washington Post

"[An] emotionally naked [book that is] compulsively readable."
–Houston Chronicle

"Eleanor’s life, the constant push-pull between her desire for her own emotional primacy and her need to be a helpmate to her husband and mother to her children, is most reminiscent of another distinguished diarist: Anne Morrow Lindbergh….although [Eleanor]’s far more emotionally naked than Lindbergh."
–Palm Beach Post

"Notes on a Life details the price often paid to attain artistic greatness, and the toll that quest can have on the lives of everyone involved in it…. Coppola takes you deeply inside the daily routines, trials, failures and triumphs of an extraordinary family, one that ultimately isn’t really all that different from anybody else, regardless of their celebrity status and awards."
–Nashville City Paper

"Coppola’s most touching memories…are expressed with honesty and dignity…. An intriguing view of one of the central figures in the Coppola filmmaking dynasty."
–Publishers Weekly

"Coppola has an artist’s eye for the world around her…. What emerges from these ‘notes’ is a portrait of an extraordinary woman who, while traveling the world, renovating huge estates, making award-winning films, and rubbing elbows with celebrities, is also just a woman like any other, struggling to balance work and family, dealing with unexpected grief, and trying to achieve spiritual and creative fulfillment. It is Coppola’s words alone, however, that make these reflections on life so thoughtful, imaginative, and completely absorbing."
–Bookslut.com

"Eleanor Coppola is a multi-talented artist who reveals in this riveting book how she has managed to help and reinforce her famous film-maker husband and to produce talented, original, and loyal children, while still holding on to her own innate creativity. In this deeply poetic and tantalizing book, replete with accounts of the Coppola appetite for visual beauty and good food, she honestly and generously shares her discoveries, while battling tragedy and disappointment, of her own magic formulas for finding joy and serenity in life."
–Lillian Ross

"Like everything Coppola writes, these are richly told stories of family and film and solitude, spanning years of creation and joy. She is a narrator you trust to pay the most wonderful attention to what is real and human in life, through the highly intelligent and kind eyes of a mother, an artist, a wife."
–Anne Lamott

"Eleanor Coppola is inspirational in the way she has managed her complicated life and family, and her artistic life, and for her candor about the frustrations and tragedies too. And how interesting a time she's had as the steady hand on the helm of that talented family."
–Diane Johnson, the author of Le Marriage and Le Divorce