Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays

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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?

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.My English teachers were the reason I became an actor. I started to understand plays and character through writing and reading an enormous amount. So I feel like I’ve always written loads, just not in this form. I’m a huge letter writer and journal keeper. I wrote music. When you are better known for something else, it feels like an adjunct, but it’s actually always been part of the centrifuge. Covid created a massive space for one to explore in that great pause. 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? 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

So “Managing Expectations” is often at its strongest in its more intimate moments, when she seeks the kinds of connections she was denied as a child and could only fake for the cameras. She’s thrilled at becoming pregnant at 37, despite being told her age and a bend in her uterus made it unlikely. (“A geriatric, toilet-shaped uterus had made my baby. I was a National Enquirer headline.”) Sneaking her way home by boat to Malibu, California, which was closed off due to wildfires, she ponders her failed relationships: “I cut through the water with a speed I’d been saving recently for sprinting away from bad thoughts.”From the death bed - last few days of living and dying -Minne’s mom talked about food — great meals shared —

Fans are more emotional when they see an actor trying NOT to cry then when they are actually crying. 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.

Summary

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. Minnie Driver is smart —unflinchingly honest— has the greatest hair- smile - face -stature - with one of the world’s greatest voices. 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 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. 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.

I listened to the audiobook which is narrated by Driver herself. I liked parts of it a lot - particularly the last essay about her mother's death which was very poignant and moving. Driver has a clever way with words and uses dialogue a lot to convey the humour in the many situations she describes. It's hard not to think that a lot of the scenes are re-imagined as opposed to remembered, as there are extensive passages of dialogue of events from twenty or thirty years ago. However, as it's a memoir in essays as opposed to a linear autobiography, it works. Thank you so much. I definitely will write more. I’d really love to write a novel. I’ve broken the seal on this. Humans fret about and question what happens beyond the end, Never about what came before our beginning. Closed loops, infinite human experience of beginning and ending so deeply connected, Only one instilling fear. I’m not frightened anymore. We are on an adventure. And this is not some 11th hour reach to spin death into a more palatable destination. We are together, this person who was my portal into life. This rare, funny, independent creature who would do the same for me, walk with me as far as she could, and then wave me off with love, safe in the knowledge that life had equipped me with everything I needed to meet death as the newest of my many experiences. This is not the typical memoir. It starts with her wild-child years from around 6 to 11. She seems proud of the fact that she's horrible at an early age, constantly running away. Some can be attributed to her unmarried parents--a wildly blunt single mother and an initially distant father who lives away with another women--but Minnie comes across as simply mean and rude. The family situation, like most of the rest of the book, is very confusing and Driver never feels the need to give readers enough information or specifics. Everybody wants it to be more than it just being a journey, Min, But that’s what it is. Death. Life. That’s the meaning of life, it’s a journey.Many people know you as an actress, musician, and also as a podcast host. But how did you know you were a writer?