Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Minnie Driver, Manilla Press, $32.99.
Setting out her memoir in essays, A-list actor, mum, singer and songwriter, Minnie Driver explores her life most extraordinary with blistering honesty and heaps of laughs.
She tells us how things not working out so often worked out remarkably well, and how reaching for the dream is easily more interesting, expansive, sad and funny than the dream itself coming true.
Driver’s biography isn’t filled with much in the way of celebrity gossip or outsize personal trauma. However, it does reflect an actor’s close attention to strange, exasperating, heartbreaking behavior all around her, conveyed with wit and poise.
There’s anger in her writing in its concluding chapter about her mother, fashion designer Gaynor Churchward, who died following a cancer diagnosis. Driver weaves her interactions with her mother and family with a fury that grows steadily at the noise the rain made on the hospital’s plastic skylight, “the gentrified tarpaulin they thought fit to serve as a roof.”
It’s sturdy in its more intimate moments, like seeking the kinds of connections she was denied as a child and could only fake for the cameras. She was thrilled about getting pregnant at 37. Driver also deliberates over her failed relationships.
As a child, she was frustrated at her parents’ split, chafing at their new partners and seeking escape. Sometimes those escapes were metaphorical retreats into singing and acting.
It was a head-spinning experience when she landed a prime role in Good Will Hunting, dating co-star Matt Damon and fielding gross, dismissive comments about her attractiveness from disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein.
Driver’s book is also full of succinct and sharpened recollections of her resoluteness and rebelliousness.
