""To what end am I driven? Not a new career at this point in my life. Not to make money, though I confess I'd enjoy having a stash I'd made myself. Not to get famous, but yes, it would be good to be a bit more visible in a family of high visibility where I am seen as the nice wife, mother, grandmother at the edge of the frame, or just cropped out.""
""Indeed, throughout her adult life, Coppola, who died in 2024, at the age of eighty-seven, was known primarily through her husband, the Oscar-winning auteur Francis Ford Coppola, and later, too, her daughter, the director Sofia Coppola. The problem of visibility plagued most American women of Coppola's generation, who came of age just before the rise of second-wave feminism, and therefore were made, as she writes, to \"prioritize given roles above who [they] really are and what [they] want to do.\"""
Eleanor Coppola kept journals throughout the final decade of her life that record her pursuit of creative endeavors and doubts about purpose. She questioned why she continued creating late in life, noting motivations beyond money or fame and a desire for visibility within a highly visible family. Visibility pressures stemmed from being primarily known through her husband Francis Ford Coppola and later her daughter Sofia Coppola. She reflected on how women of her generation were expected to prioritize given roles over personal ambitions. The journals confront questions of selfhood, belonging, and whether she counted as an independent person apart from celebrated kin.
Read at The New Yorker
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