Managing Expectations

March 28, 2022
Actor Driver parlays her ebullient charm from the screen to the page in this sparkling debut, a series of amusing essays on Hollywood, motherhood, and the vicissitudes of life. Taking readers from her fraught English childhood in the 1970s to the glittering career that followed her breakout role in 1995’s Circle of Friends, Driver muses on everything from her famous curls (“like giant springs pogoing in perpetual motion”) in “Butterfly Hair” to the unglamorous trials of being a working actress (when “all the momentum gathered in making Circle of Friends seemed to have disappeared,” she writes, “I couldn’t even book a fake orgasm”) and surviving 2018’s devastating wildfires in Malibu with her husband and son, in the introspective “Sea-Based Incursion.” Throughout, Driver’s beguiling wit and candor steal the show, even as she contends with the more difficult subjects later in life, such as the grief of losing her mother to cancer. Movingly recalling their final days and conversations together—including one about bread, which they concluded was “really just a butter vessel”—Driver observes, “We are on an adventure, and this is not some eleventh-hour reach to spin death into a more palatable destination.” Humorous and heartfelt, this is sure to please fans.

April 15, 2022
A memoir, William Zinsser writes, "isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a lifetime." Here the actor, singer, and songwriter Driver raises the curtain on key moments in her life from childhood through adulthood. Amelia Fiona Jessica "Minnie" Driver was born in England and spent part of her childhood in Barbados. Best known for her roles in Circle of Friends and Good Will Hunting and for a trio of albums (Everything I've Got in My Pocket, Seastories, Ask Me to Dance), she has also appeared in many other films and television programs in England and the U.S. Driver candidly shares her joys and sorrows and successes and failures with wit, grace, and humor. She has an eye for the telling detail and easily parses the significance of each experience she writes about. The final essay in the collection is particularly affecting. In it, she writes movingly about her mother's final illness and death in a way that will connect with anyone who has faced that experience. Fans of arts memoirs will enjoy this thoughtful and elegant book.

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Starred review from March 15, 2022
The veteran actor delivers a memoir in a series of deftly crafted essays. In her debut, Driver engagingly writes about family dramas, self-doubt, her unruly hair, unexpected motherhood, and the trajectory of her career. She grew up partly in England, with her mother, sister, brother, and the man her mother had recently married; and partly in Barbados, where her father lived. "None of it makes any sense," she writes about her childhood. "There is no conversation about all this change. New people wander into our landscape and nobody but me thinks it's weird." Fed up with Driver's rudeness toward his girlfriend, her father sent her back to England, which required an overnight stay, alone, at Miami's Fontainebleau Hotel. Reflecting on her feelings then, she writes, "I always want grown-ups to like me, but find it difficult to behave in a way that seems to consistently please them." After graduating from acting school, she was despondent about being the only one in her class without an agent. "The place I found myself stuck, at twenty," she writes, "was being a new adult--still furnished with a child's dream plan, but being asked to manifest it in a world of adult expectations." After appearing in the lead role in the 1995 film Circle of Friends, for which she was paid $10,000, Driver expected other offers to roll in. But these were so slow in coming that she took off to Uruguay, where her sister was living with a boyfriend. For the author, beach life seemed a possible future--until she was summoned to New York for an audition. Walking anonymously through the streets of Manhattan, she suddenly felt liberated. "I can consciously decide who I am and not let circumstance or previous damage dictate it," she gushed to her sister. "I can be the conscious architect of my own life!" Driver's spirited prose informs all the essays; a standout is her graceful, moving chronicle, radiant with love, of her mother's last days. Sharp observations and quirky irreverence make for a delightful read.

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