Notes on a Life
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
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.
Customer Reviews
Beautifully written, exquisitely experienced
My only regret with this book is that it ended.