Notes on a Life [Hardcover]

Eleanor Coppola (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 6, 2008

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Coppola (Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now) has gathered together excerpts from 20 years of her personal journals and in the process she captures the experiences of being a wife, mother and artist trying to find her own self-expression in the midst of a talented family. While there's an emotional price to pay in supporting her family's careers, Coppola has expressed herself in painting, conceptual art pieces and her documentary, Hearts of Darkness, which chronicled the creation of Apocalypse Now. As the author confesses: I'm an observer at heart. As befits its source material, this book has a fragmented style; Coppola uses objects to spark memory, such as a pair of patent leather shoes found in 2002, which prompts her to recall a 1998 brunch when her husband advised their daughter about filmmaking. Some of the entries seem aimless and the jumps in time are occasionally forced, but Coppola's most touching memories, following the sudden death of her son Gio, are expressed with honesty and dignity. While this is certainly not a book for film buffs, it does supply an intriguing view of one of the central figures in the Coppola filmmaking dynasty. (May)
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From Booklist

Acclaimed documentary filmmaker, artist, and author Coppola applies her powers of reflection to the life she’s led as wife of a cinematic giant and mother of a brilliant young director: Francis Ford Coppola and Sofia Coppola Written in diary form, her intimate observations of her family’s peripatetic and tumultuous existence spans decades and crosses continents, revealing moments of abject tragedy as well as those of sheer joy. A disarming honesty informs every episode Coppola shares, yet what infuses it all is her keen sensitivity to the world around her, as she lyrically describes events as mundane as a walk in the woods or as monumental as a stroll down the red carpet at the Academy Awards. By any accounts a rich, full, and charmed life, Coppola’s is, nonetheless, still filled with the same doubts, misgivings, and regrets that any woman from any walk of life will recognize; as if to say: forget the name, see me for who I really am. --Carol Haggas

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese; 1 edition (May 6, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385524994
• ISBN-13: 978-0385524995
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,271,656 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Trials of a Hollywood Wife, July 9, 2008

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Notes on a Life (Hardcover)

Consider the problem of the wife who has a successful husband and has for decades put him and their family first, and her own aspirations second. It's not a novel problem, but is instead too common to be of much interest: let's just count on the woman to take care of herself and her family and her career as best she can. The situation might, however, be particularly interesting if the family moves in the highest of Hollywood circles, with many family members involved in moviemaking, and with the wife herself a successful filmmaker, artist, and memoirist. In the beginning of _Notes on a Life_ (Nan A. Talese), Eleanor Coppola says, "I am an observer at heart," and this is manifestly true, but she is also a reporter, whether in her movie _Hearts of Darkness_ which is a documentary about the making of _Apocalypse Now_ by her husband Francis Ford Coppola, or in her previous book which was a memoir of the making of that film, or in her other films about her children's films. As fits a memoir from a devoted and dutiful wife and mother, this is a book mostly about her family and about how she has cared for them. It may have all happened in extraordinary circles, but it is delightful to read this candid memoir and realize that for all the working trips to exotic locales, and the house in Napa Valley, and hobnobbing with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, Eleanor Coppola's marriage and family are a lot like anyone else's. They come with problems, and she works on them, and gets things done, and she quite clearly loves what she and they have managed to accomplish.

An idea follows her all through the decades covered in the diary entries here: "I have an ongoing internal war, a conflict between wanting to be a good wife and mother and also to draw, paint, design, write and shoot videos. I focus on the family and imagine there will be time for my interests, but there rarely is." She does manage to make time for herself, but it isn't easy, and there were times she was deeply depressed. Her book often reflects on how she managed to solve the problem in her own ways, knowing that the problem was never completely solved any more than her children's (or husband's) problems were completely out of her thoughts. She has had to be an itinerant mom at Easter times: "I hid eggs in the hotel room in Trieste during _Godfather II_, in the tropical foliage at our house in Manila during _Apocalypse Now_, in the city park in Tulsa during _The Outsiders_, and in the apartment in NYC during _Cotton Club_." As she looks for her place in all this, it might be that she could come off as a whining overprivileged yuppie, but she maintains an amused tone and is constantly self deprecating. She is happiest when her family is all around her, and Frances seems to be the same way. She always has doubts about how well she is taking care of all of them, but she does love the job. When her daughter Sofia was working on Sofia's movie _Lost in Translation_, Eleanor went to see her in Japan: "As we hugged I could feel her thin arms and shoulders. I was glad I'd brought her a Tupperware container of chocolate chip cookies." There are paths not taken, and she is imaginative enough to wonder about them, but has little reason to regret where her eventual path has taken her.

_Notes_ is indeed excerpts from Coppola's notebook, arranged by general themes, with flashbacks through the decades to an old entry as a memory is triggered. Much of it is sweet, and some is deeply sad. A lot is funny; for a scene in _Dracula_, we are introduced to an unusual assistant on the film who is helping in a scene with Tom Waits: "The bug wrangler was standing nearby. He had several additional tins of maggots and beetles. He occasionally prodded the contents of Tom's plate to make sure they were all moving." There are lots of stars wandering through her life, of course. Note, for instance, Brando, whom she met on the set of _The Godfather_: "It was the first time I really understood what charisma was ... I felt as if I were standing in a special beam of light and he found me utterly fascinating." Through all the book, though, are notes of a creative woman taking (usually) the conventional marital role: "Over the years I stopped whatever it was I was doing to go on location with Francis and the children. I sincerely tried to be a good wife and mother to my family. For a variety of reasons, I haven't created a body of notable work in my life when many around me have, and I haven't yet made peace with that truth." I'd venture to guess that even if she had more exhibits, more documentaries, and more books to her name, she'd still have the artist's hunger to do more. There is also the mom's worry that she wasn't doing more for her children, a worry she is letting go of now that they are not children. Worries aside, "long consistent body of work" aside, _Notes_ is a beautifully written record of a life lived well, with the right priorities of convention assumed and convention shunned.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Honest and revealing, June 8, 2008

By 

N. Guido "Writernan" (East Tennessee) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Notes on a Life (Hardcover)

Just finished this extraordinary book. Eleanor comes across as a woman who necessarily wears many hats, putting aside many of her own desires and talents as an artist to satisfy her family's needs first and foremost. Extraordinarily frank and heart wrenching as she wrote about the loss of of her son, Gio, though this book is so much more. At first I found the notes of observation, her writing style, to be hard to grasp, but gradually it was as though she had became a friend with all the details in her many revelations and wonderment. I did enjoy reading and would highly recommend to others who have suffered the pain of loss . . . and, more importantly, endured.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Notes on a Life, October 27, 2008

By 

Eileen Torpey "indie film" (Santa Fe, New Mexico) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Notes on a Life (Hardcover)

Eleanor Coppola is an artist I genuinely respect. I was honored in 2005 to work on her traveling art installation "Circle of Memory" in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I am both a studio artist and an indie filmmaker and really appreciated her perspective and experiences that she so poetically expresses in her book "Notes on a Life." I loved it!