Critical Praise

“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

“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

“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