Managing Expectations
By
Minnie Driver
I had no expectations when I decided to listen to Minnie Driver’s memoir Managing Expectations on audio. I was familiar with the actress from movies like Good Will Hunting and Grosse Point Blank but knew little about her personal life. Managing Expectations is a handful of detailed essays from defining moments in Driver’s life. Driver shares her reaction to being removed from her home when her mother decided to leave her father and how she antagonized her mother’s new husband and her father’s girlfriend past the tipping point. She describes her loneliness at boarding school and the audition at that school that helped fuel her need to perform.
Driver talks about her relationship with her blond and beautiful sister and shares the pain of her mother’s death. Driver describes her surprise at discovering she was pregnant and almost losing her home to the Malibu fires years ago.
Woven throughout these essays are heartwarming and enlightening life lessons that Driver feels were often learned after too much trial and error. I laughed out loud at some of her antics as a precocious child. Driver narrated the audio book which made these essays on life even more appealing.
I enjoyed Managing Expectations and finished the book feeling as if I had just found a new friend in Minnie Driver.
