Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

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although I did feel a little embarrassed for her when she started singing (all in fun) -a treat for the audiobook listeners.

This memoir gives you a good sense of Minnie’s Driver’s personality, passions, and unorthodox life: she’s funny, intelligent, and she knows how to tell a story. Although she had a lot of success in her early 20s, in an important sense - certainly in terms of motherhood and finding a life partner - she was a late bloomer.A charming, poignant, and mesmerizing memoir in essays from beloved actor and natural-born storyteller Minnie Driver, chronicling the way life works out even when it doesn’t. So, this is a collection of stories about how things not working out - worked out in the end. How reaching for the dream is easily more interesting, expansive, sad and funny than the dream itself coming true. But it’s worth it to start at the beginning of Driver’s book, which is full of pithy and sharp recollections of her rebelliousness and determination. As a child, she was frustrated at her parents’ split, chafing at their new partners and seeking escape. Sometimes those escapes were metaphorical retreats into singing and acting. Others involved real distance: In one chapter, she recalls offending her father’s girlfriend so badly that her dad sent 11-year old Driver home to England from Barbados by herself. At a stopover in a Miami hotel, she all but clears out the gift shop, and the grown-up Driver can see her sublimating her anger at the way “new people wander into our landscape and nobody but me thinks it’s weird.” I’ve been a Killing Eve fan, Jodie Comer is a goddess. I’m a big Sex Education fan as well. I love the writing on that show. I’ll watch anything with Julia Garner in it. She was amazing in Inventing Anna.

A MARIE CLAIRE BEST MEMOIR OF THE YEAR - A USA TODAY MUST READ BOOK - A W MAGAZINE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK - A SHEREADS BEST MEMOIR OF THE SUMMER Women sit on the edge with their legs dangling in the water while their children scream mom! Watch this! and then proceed to perform no particular feat beyond splashing around, illustrating some thing I have always known which is that 90% of good parenting is bearing witness.

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The fiercest writing in “Managing Expectations” is in its concluding chapter about her mother, fashion designer Gaynor Churchward, who died last year following a cancer diagnosis. Driver weaves her interactions with her mother and family with a slow-growing fury at the noise the rain makes on the hospital’s plastic skylight, “the gentrified tarpaulin they thought fit to serve as a roof.” We have all been charmed by Minnie Driver on the screen, but it’s a divine pleasure to learn the woman behind some of our most beloved characters is a writer of true precision, wit and style who has had a life more compelling than any movie. This book will be a companion to those struggling to make sense of their own story and a clarion call to mothers (of all kinds) grappling with their identity. I was comforted, galvanized, touched and - no surprise considering the author - charmed, too. — Lena Dunham I feel a rising anger that there is yet another byproduct of this punishment: making the familiar unfamiliar. Making it unsafe. Could all the good things in my life with the removal of a few key elements all become ghosts? Minnie Driver has held many occupations: she’s been an actress, a musician, and even a purveyor of jeans. But now, the actress adds one more title to her résumé: memoirist. In Driver’s new book, Managing Expectations, she takes readers along for the ride, detailing her at-times unconventional upbringing in England, her journey to motherhood, and her winding career path, from the first big film she booked to the moment she was cast in what would become an Oscar-nominated role in Good Will Hunting (without naming names of the screenwriters—one of whom she was involved in a public relationship with for some time after the film was released in 1997). She shares the story of her life in ten honest, emotional, and erudite essays, charmingly proving that she was born to be a storyteller, no matter the medium.

I also came away with the highest respect for her integrity- to stand for what’s right when there is little agreement to do so. Will you write more books? I’m asking because I’m curious, but also because I’m pleading for you to write more. From the death bed - last few days of living and dying -Minne’s mom talked about food — great meals shared — don’t get me started) > I could start rolling on the floor peeing my pants laughing at a couple of stories she told). In this intimate, beautifully crafted collection, Driver writes with disarming charm and candor about her bohemian upbringing between England and Barbados; her post-university travails and triumphs—from being the only student in her acting school not taken on by an agent to being discovered at a rave in a muddy field in the English countryside; shooting to fame in one of the most influential films of the 1990s and being nominated for an Academy Award; and finding the true light of her life, her son. She chronicles her unconventional career path, including the time she gave up on acting to sell jeans in Uruguay, her journey as a single parent, and the heartbreaking loss of her mother.

It changed our lives forever': Molly Shannon opens new memoir with accident that killed mother, sister The audiobook also includes a postscript in which Driver is interviewed by the screenwriter and novelist Emma Forrest about the writing process, after which, in a tribute to her first botched TV appearance at the age of nine, Driver sings the song “They Said It Was My Tree”, stifling giggles throughout. This celebrity's guardedness and walls are way up as we learn very little about Minnie Driver in a disappointing autobiography that only gives glimpses of her life story. There are just 5 or 6 real stories within, the rest of it being small thoughts about different times of her life with few specifics and huge gaps in her timeline. And if you're looking for any insights into her film or TV work you'll find none here because she says nothing about her work on sets and skips most of her productions.

Driver had an unconventional childhood. There was financial privilege – a nanny in her early years, regular trips to Barbados – but also plenty of emotional instability. Her parents, who separated when she was six, were unmarried; she later discovered that her father was actually married to another woman, with whom he had a child.I find out at this point that it’s the more Innocuous questions in life that will make me cry. Hard questions, In a difficult situation, will act as an alloy. They’ll make me stronger. It’s the soft questions that have no heat behind them, they are the ones that will be my undoing, particularly in public.