Minnie Driver's 'dazzling' memoir goes to Manilla Press

Manilla Press has snapped up a "dazzling" memoir by actress Minnie Driver, whose credits include a breakout role in "Circle of Friends" and the 1997 film "Good Will Hunting".

Margaret Stead, publisher, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, for Managing Expectations from Cait Hoyt at The Creative Artists Agency. It will publish in hardback, audio and e-book in May 2022. It will also be released simultaneously by HarperOne in the US.

Managing Expectations is described as a collection of "delicately crafted, heartfelt essays". The publisher said: "Suffused with warmth and humour, Minnie shares poignant, candid and honest stories of her unconventional childhood, the shock of fame, motherhood, love, success, failure, the power of sisterly love, and the loss of her beloved mother. In her own words, it’s about how things not working out actually worked out in the end, and how reaching for the dream is easily more interesting, expansive, sad and funny than the dream itself coming true."

Stead said: "Managing Expectations is poignant, clever, laugh-out-loud funny and achingly sad. Who knew that Minnie Driver could write like a dream as well as everything else she’s done? Minnie is a joy to work with. She has so much wisdom to share, and this memoir demonstrates her wonderful ability as a writer, which we are thrilled to showcase for the first time."

Driver added: "I have spent the greater part of the last 30 years synthesising other people’s stories. It was fun; it still is. But eventually, if storytelling is the central thesis of your life, you start to question why you aren't telling your own. I am aware that what most people want from a celebrity memoir is juicy, behind the scenes intel and while there is a little of that in my book, there’s rather more of the juicy, behind the scenes intel of an ordinary human life, which is sometimes made extraordinary by circumstance.

"It seems to me that this is relatable; that no matter what you do for a living, things are both hard and exalted in life, love works out or it doesn’t, we are both confident and insecure and there is no glamour in profound loss. The films I like best, both to watch and be in, are the ones that make you laugh and also cry. They don't need to be life changing for the audience, but they do need to make you feel. I tried to choose stories to tell with this in mind, to choose the ones that are most connected to the brilliant, messy business of being alive."