Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

Product Information

Suddenly she's acting, though we don't know how or why she was given her first role because she just jumps ahead a decade and suddenly she's out of college and in a movie. The entire book is like this, where she provides only a few pieces to her life story, and she is often depressed or melancholy for no reason since we don't have enough of her history to understand. Picture Minnie Driver's life as a 1000-piece puzzle, but she only gives us 50 pieces here to assemble the picture. 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.

This book is memoir-ish. A tell-most. Largely because there's a lot I don't remember, and a lot that's not worth talking about.

Summary

To reveal oneself in a manner that is at once poignant and fiercely intelligent while also being funny, warm, and genuine, is quite a feat. Minnie Driver shows us she is even more than what’s met the eye all these years. Simply put: I love this book!” — Therese Ann Fowler, author of A Good Neighborhood and Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald I think this quote, taken from an essay/chapter called “I’m Going to Miami”, reveals a lot about Minnie Driver’s personality - true when she was a child, and probably still true. She describes herself (and also her signature mop of hair) as “a lot”: she has a big, emotional personality, she asks a lot of questions, and she doesn’t know how to not be herself, even though her chosen vocation is acting (and also singing and writing).

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.” For step-free access from the Queen Elizabeth Hall Slip Road off Belvedere Road to the Queen Elizabeth Hall auditorium seating (excluding rows A to C) and wheelchair spaces in the Rear Stalls, plus Queen Elizabeth Hall Foyer and the Purcell Room, please use the Queen Elizabeth Hall main entrance.Talk to a member of staff at the auditorium entrance if you have a disability that means you can’t queue, or you need extra time to take your seat. They can arrange priority entry for you as soon as the doors open. I’m really crazy about this very young British writer called Saba Sams. She wrote a book called Send Nudes, and she’s an extraordinary talent. I’m just halfway through The Sellout by Paul Beatty and this Elif Batuman book called The Idiot, which is brilliant. I’m crazy about Deborah Levy, she’s probably my favorite memoirist of all time. She does these things called living autobiographies where they’re literally autobiographies, but they’re about her life now. 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.

The stories you tell of your childhood, growing up as a precocious child in England with your sister, your mom and her husband, and later visiting your dad in the Caribbean, were fascinating. You remember so many funny details, like your hilarious description of a flight attendant who helped you when you were a child traveling solo to Miami. How did you recall all of those little moments? The structure of the book is particularly interesting. Driver makes no effort to connect all the dots of her life; instead, the reader gets a series of stories, all representative in their way. It’s Driver’s top ten of the really important stuff, ending with her mother’s death. Minnie Driver's Managing Expectations was recommended by many trusted book friends and it's a well-written and at times, very entertaining book, if not particularly insightful.In two cases the adult stories are fleshed out a bit more. After only hinting at other men in her life, the first is her dating Matt Damon. It is an abnormal revelation that is obviously meant to skewer the famous actor who dumped her without notice. Minnie, all these years later, is still miffed and upset, and Damon looks like a real bad guy. Like Lena Dunham in Not That Kind of Girl, Gabrielle Union in We’re Going to Need More Wine and Patti Smith in Just Kids, Driver writes with razor-sharp humor and grace as she explores navigating the depths of failure, fighting for success, discovering the unmatched wonder and challenge of motherhood, and wading through immeasurable grief. Effortlessly charming, deeply funny, personal, and honest, Managing Expectations reminds us of the way life works out—even when it doesn’t. Critical Praise