Your podcast Minnie Questions with Minnie Driver features such a wide range of guests, from celebrities to your collaborators to your son. What other podcasts do you like to listen to? Fans are more emotional when they see an actor trying NOT to cry then when they are actually crying. Books were ‘major’ in their family. ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’ was as big of a hit for Mom&Minnie story time togetherness as it was for me and Katy (my oldest daughter)…. 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.

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. 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. All night as she leaves in and out of sleep and deep pain, We talk about food. The nursery food of her childhood, learning to love the disgusting when everything good was rationed during the war, her lifelong love of butter and how bread was good but really just a butter vessel. Completely captivating.” — Lily King, award-winning and bestselling author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria

Summary

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. 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. For access to the Queen Elizabeth Hall auditorium seating rows A to C and wheelchair spaces in the Front Stalls, please enter via the Artists' Entrance in the Queen Elizabeth Hall Slip Road (Level 1). 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? I love stories. I have mostly told other people's but now, in telling my own, I realize how all our stories are connected by that great leveller of acclaim, loss, fortitude, and fortune: being human.

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.Ms. 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.

You can also use the external lift near the Artists' Entrance on Southbank Centre Square to reach Mandela Walk, Level 2. A dazzling 'tell-most' memoir: poignant and laugh-out-loud funny scenes from the life of actor Minnie Driver. although I did feel a little embarrassed for her when she started singing (all in fun) -a treat for the audiobook listeners. 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.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.” 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 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

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. There’s an essay in your book where you write about the summer after you graduated from drama school, and you weren’t really able to find work as an actress, but you did spend a lot of time going to raves in fields. What’s the last concert you attended? 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. I always want grown-ups to like me but find it difficult to behave in a way that seems to consistently please them. Grown-up love appears to be very conditional, and they are not conditions I can really abide by - not for long, anyway. One minute they’re laughing at the fact that I know what “existential” means and the next moment they’re all “Can you shut up now? You’re really getting on my nerves.” 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.”If you want to get to know Minnie Driver the Oscar-nominated celebrity, skip straight to chapter seven of her memoir in essays,“Managing Expectations” (HarperOne, 288 pp., ★★★out of four, out Tuesday). There, she dishes about her head-spinning experience landing a prime role in “Good Will Hunting,” dating costar Matt Damonand fielding gross, dismissive comments about her attractiveness from disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein. (This, she writes, from a man “whose shirts were always aggressively encrusted with egg/tuna fish/mayo.”) From the death bed - last few days of living and dying -Minne’s mom talked about food — great meals shared — 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.