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68
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
59/100Critics
77/100Scholars
Author:
Minnie Driver
Publisher:
HarperOne
Date:
May 3, 2022
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 triumphsâfrom 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.
What The Reviewers Say
... full of pithy and sharp recollections of her rebelliousness and determination.
... latest in a long list of essay collections by celebrities that have been published over the past decade or so. It’s also one of the best. From the very first essay, Surprise, which begins with an enraged nine-year-old Driver being driven back to boarding school against her will after a weekend at home, Driver establishes her distinct literary voice: warm but unsentimental, emotionally insightful, with a strong sense of the absurd.
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..
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.
