The Butchers : Winner of the 2021 RSL Ondaatje Prize

A dazzling 'tell-most' memoir: poignant and laugh-out-loud funny scenes from the life of actor Minnie Driver. Managing Expectations is a collection of delicately crafted, hilarious and heartfelt essays, described as a 'tell-most', in which Minnie Driver uses her formidable storytelling skills to examine and understand her less-than-ordinary life. 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. 'When I was six, I wrote my first short essay, about how when I grew up, I wanted to be a farmer's daughter. My dad worked in insurance. Now, though, I realise how apt that ambition was. It set up a template in my life of wanting something impossible to become true. How in trying to make something impossible happen, and failing repeatedly, other things happened. Things that became my life. A life I love, because it was made with so many holes that I enjoy filling in.'