Notes on a Life

Book excerpt: Eleanor Coppola shares her 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. This book travels between the center of the film world and the intimate heart of her family. She looks 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.