Life at the Edge of a Famous Family

This comparatively reduced terrain has often served arsenic complement to her husband’s overmuch grander vistas. “I americium the observer, the assemblage watching the enactment arsenic if successful a theater,” she writes, successful “Two of Me,” of visiting Francis connected acceptable portion helium directs his latest and apt last filmic extravaganza, “Megalopolis” (2024). Similarly, successful “Notes: On the Making of ‘Apocalypse Now’ ” she describes a analyzable determination sprout connected a beach, involving the simulation of a napalm bombing. “The napalm went disconnected close with the jets, flying done frame, perfectly. . . . Twelve 100 gallons of gasoline went up successful astir a infinitesimal and a half,” she writes. Stationed fractional a mile distant from the tract of the explosion, she records, simply, that she “felt a beardown flash of heat”—the spare, withholding prose suggesting her presumption arsenic a specified assemblage successful the landscape, sensing alternatively than analyzing, experiencing alternatively than reacting. In an earlier diary introduction from the aforesaid day, she reports, again with small elaboration, connected the quality betwixt the precise fewer women and the galore men she watches connected set. “The flabby American men are getting tan and strong,” she writes. “The women look tired.”

Among these bushed women is Coppola herself, and “Two of Me” suggests that this fatigue didn’t conscionable stem from the nightmarishly agelong “Apocalypse” sprout she described successful her archetypal “Notes.” It besides came from the elemental tensions wrong the Coppola matrimony itself. Eleanor Coppola was a pistillate who, arsenic she writes, dreamed of surviving her beingness arsenic an “adventure” portion moving connected her ain “art projects” and raising children connected movie sets, “like a circus family,” but had to simultaneously fulfill the demands of her brilliant, mercurial, sometimes wayward husband, who wanted her to beryllium a “very accepted wife, happily devoted to caring for our children, creating a bully home, and supporting his career.” During astir of her life, she was indeed—to riff connected the book’s title—“Two of Her.” Who among america wouldn’t beryllium exhausted by specified an inherently paradoxical position?

“Two of Me,” however, does picture the opening of an unexpected aperture, done which Coppola was capable to yet entree a measurement of state from this duality—one that wasn’t disposable to her during astir of her big life. In 2010, an X-ray scan revealed a uncommon benignant of tumor increasing successful Coppola’s chest. Though the doctors she consulted with advised her to statesman chemotherapy to shrink the growth, she feared that the attraction would trim her prime of life, and decided to wait, instead—practicing alternate therapies and undergoing scans each six months to show the tumor’s gradual progress. (She lived for fourteen much years, experiencing the increasing tumor’s sizeable sick effects lone successful the past mates of years of her life.) In the book, she describes her family’s unhappiness astatine her determination to forego accepted therapy: “Francis told maine helium and the children indispensable beryllium paramount successful immoderate determination I made, and they were anxious for maine to proceed with a therapy, an action, a solution that would instrumentality maine retired of danger,” she writes. Coppola, however, refused to crook to their urging, adjacent though, arsenic she admits, she had “no ‘reasonable’ statement oregon evidence” to enactment her decision, and, arsenic I work along, I imagined with what vexation and possibly choler I mightiness person reacted had idiosyncratic adjacent to maine rejected accepted medicine to dainty a large illness.

But from another, perchance much symbolic perspective, Coppola’s determination made sense, astatine slightest according to the presumption successful which she saw her life. “I was stunned to recognize that I was truthful conditioned by my upbringing to beryllium a bully miss and travel doctor’s orders that it had ne'er occurred to maine that the choices for my beingness were excavation to make,” she writes. The tumor was “[a] large teacher,” a “swift kick” that yet compelled Coppola to peep “out from down the shadiness of [her] family.” Though the maturation was a constraining thing, an obstruction “pressing against [Coppola’s] bosom and lungs”—and, arsenic such, not dissimilar the pressures she was utilized to navigating during astir of her beingness arsenic a woman and mother—these limitations were what yet fto her grasp the limits of her ain autonomy. “What did I person to lose?” she writes. “I was going to dice anyway.” In 2016, Coppola became, arsenic she notes, the oldest pistillate to nonstop her archetypal diagnostic film, the romanticist drama “Paris Can Wait.” (In 2020, astatine property eighty-four, she followed up with the movie “Love Is Love Is Love.”) But these quantifiable achievements weren’t the lone markers of her newfound freedom. The publication itself is simply a small-scale cri de coeur, animated by Coppola’s tenacity—by her insistence connected tracing the contours of her ain world, successful writing.