An outsider, with access of a famous insider

"I am fascinated to be an observer of the creative process," Coppola writes, and it's clearly true. She also acknowledges being resentful that it's usually someone else's creative process she's observing. Like many women of her generation, she pushed aside many of her aspirations when she married and had children. The difference is that she didn't marry a guy with an ordinary job, she married a man who turned out to be one of America's greatest film directors. Francis Ford Coppola is, not surprisingly, the elephant in the room in his wife's memoir, which is a three-dimensional portrait of a marriage unlike any other, and yet not so very different after all.

The particulars are more glamorous, to be sure. If you're going to be bogged down in domestic details, reviewing plans for remodeling the wine cellar or whipping up dinner for 20 on short notice when the cast of "Dracula" comes over certainly beats scrubbing floors and defrosting the freezer. But Coppola's done those chores too, often in remote locations with cranky toddlers in tow, and she's not the only spouse to be irked by a partner who "goes to work, intently focused on his project, [while] I attend to little tasks." When Francis bemoans his excessive obligations and overscheduled life, he's talking about awards ceremonies and all-expenses-paid junkets to foreign countries. When he petulantly informs her, "And you don't look out for me. . . . You don't help me," he's just another self-absorbed workaholic who thinks his wife's job is to take care of him.

When she calmly responds that "he sets his calendar himself with his assistant," she's another veteran of a long marriage who no longer feels obliged to solve all her mate's problems. Frank about Francis' faults, Coppola also captures his zest for life, his intelligence and charm, his passion for moviemaking, his love for her and their children. (The death of their 22-year-old son Gio in a freak accident, starkly described in the opening pages, devastated them both and haunts the author throughout the book.) Their relationship isn't perfect, but neither is it the oppressive bond of a male chauvinist and his subservient wife. Sofia grew up to be as assertive and career-focused as her father; younger son Roman, second-unit director on several of his father's and sister's films, seems more like his mother.