Notes For A Life

Notes for a Life

Notes on a Life

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.

Notes on a Near-Life Experience

Mia never thought she'd be the child of a broken home. Yet when she's 15 years old, one day her father just up and moves out. As her family life crumbles, her love life is finally coming together. Julian, her brother Allen's best friend and her longtime crush, has finally noticed her—and being with Julian makes her happier than she can put into words. Meanwhile, her mother has disappeared into work, her brother is skipping school and acting weird, and her father is cohabitating with a frighteningly sexy Peruvian woman named Paloma. Mia wishes the divorce would just go away so she could focus on Julian . . . but she can't ignore her problems forever. In this honest, witty, utterly accessible winner of the Delacorte Press Contest, first-time author Olivia Birdsall creates an authentic and lovable teenager in Mia Day.