‘What did I have to lose? I was going to die anyway.’

A terrifying, rare cancer diagnosis prompted Eleanor Coppola to confront her role as the matriarch of an accomplished film family and her creative challenges as an artist late in life.

Her new and final book is an honest and revealing posthumous memoir about her struggle to balance her role as a wife and mother and her career as a writer and filmmaker (including the 1979 book, Notes: On the making of Apocalypse Now, and the 1991 documentary film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse).

Her story is both heartbreaking and heartwarming, and details the final years of her life over periods of creative growth and resilience despite artistic and physical setbacks.

With an introduction by Sofia Coppola and an afterword by Alice Waters.

Edited by Davia Nelson and Vendela Vida, and designed by Bryan Cipolla.