Managing Expectations opens with the young Minnie Driver leaning out of her mother’s car window and screaming: “Help me, I am being abducted!” It is Sunday night and, after spending the weekend at home, she is being returned to her Hampshire boarding school. “We live three miles from the school. It makes no sense,” she says.
Read with verve and humour by Driver, the book comprises a series of essays on the pivotal moments in her life. These include the time her father sent her home from Barbados, aged 11, as a punishment for being rude to his girlfriend. The journey back to London, which she undertook alone, included a stopover at a swish hotel in Miami where she got her revenge by buying up half the gift shop on her father’s credit card.
