Notes on a Life

by Eleanor Coppola

Book Overview

Eleanor Coppola's first book, Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now, was hailed as "one of the most revealing of all firsthand looks at the movies" (Los Angeles Herald Examiner). Now the author brings... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385524994
• ISBN13: 9780385524995
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Length: 290 Pages
• Weight: 1.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.6" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Notes on a Life

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!

Notes on Notes

I had high expectations for this book, afterall, she is a Coppola! And just like her famous family members, she met them. I loved the "time travel" feeling from jumping back and fourth through Eleanor Coppola's diary. What a tremendous person with a tremendous amount to give.

The Trials of a Hollywood Wife

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

Honest and revealing

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.