Managing Expectations

September 1, 2022

Actress, singer, and songwriter Driver allows listeners in on her colorful perspective of her life. She narrates her own memoir, unleashing her full storytelling abilities. Her bohemian upbringing, her nontraditional family life, and especially her hair struggles are woven into this memoir, which pulls the listener right into her inner circle. People with wavy, curly, and uncontrollable hair will find affirmation in her beautiful description of her hair trying to escape from her head, each lock headed toward a different direction. Her parents, her sister, a primary grade teacher, and her agents all periodically take center stage to guide her through her early life and career. Her life isn't always easy and doesn't work out exactly as she thought; she has horrible, painful moments. Then there are the moments of existential joy. Her pitch never changes, but the pauses work miracles as she weaves the story. In an interview included in the audiobook, she relates how reading the story aloud lets the full weight of the experiences described land so much more powerfully. The listener will experience this as well. VERDICT Will certainly meet listeners' expectations!--Laura Trombley

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 28, 2022
Actor 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. Taking readers from her fraught English childhood in the 1970s to the glittering career that followed her breakout role in 1995’s Circle of Friends, Driver muses on everything from her famous curls (“like giant springs pogoing in perpetual motion”) in “Butterfly Hair” to the unglamorous trials of being a working actress (when “all the momentum gathered in making Circle of Friends seemed to have disappeared,” she writes, “I couldn’t even book a fake orgasm”) and surviving 2018’s devastating wildfires in Malibu with her husband and son, in the introspective “Sea-Based Incursion.” Throughout, Driver’s beguiling wit and candor steal the show, even as she contends with the more difficult subjects later in life, such as the grief of losing her mother to cancer. Movingly recalling their final days and conversations together—including one about bread, which they concluded was “really just a butter vessel”—Driver observes, “We are on an adventure, and this is not some eleventh-hour reach to spin death into a more palatable destination.” Humorous and heartfelt, this is sure to please fans.