About the Book:
From the Academy Award®–winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction.
I've been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.
Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life's challenges - how to get relative with the inevitable - you can enjoy a state of success I call "catching greenlights."
So, I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.
Hopefully, it's medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot's license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.
It's a love letter. To life.
It's also a guide to catching more greenlights - and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.
Good luck.
Published by Penguin Random House
Released October 2020
My Thoughts:
Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey has been keeping me company each time I've gotten into the car this week. It's his memoir, narrated by himself, which adds to the overall listening experience immensely - the dulcet tones of his familiar Southern drawl are more than alright, alright, alright.
This is his life story from childhood through to the age of 50. It's entertaining, so much more so for his narration, as an actor, he's all over the drama and comic value in the retelling. Interspersed with the reminiscing are his 'greenlight' moments, those experiences that he deems life shaping. There's also 'bumper stickers', 'prescriptions', 'notes to self', and three wet dreams he claims guided him to life-changing experiences, giving this memoir a sort of self-help feel that at times is profound, at others, absurd. But always, above all, entertaining.
From a regular 1970s/1980s childhood in a 'blue collar' family in Texas, to a year after finishing high school in a small town in Australia, to university back in Texas for a law degree swapped out for film school in New York, at every step, Matthew applies a determination and optimism that is solid and inspiring. There are moments along the way of being lost, unsure of his path, deep searches for meaning.
After almost twenty years of being pigeon-holed into rom-coms, a genre that made his career but also led him to much discontent, he tells of refusing every offer for two years until at last, different scripts began coming his way and he was able to reshape himself into the serious actor he'd thought he was going to be when he originally became famous from A Time to Kill.
It's not all about the career though. Meeting his wife, having his children, trips to far flung places to find himself. This is a terrifically well-rounded memoir. There's no deep dark scandals being aired, people being outed for bad behaviour or any trashing of fellow Hollywood peeps. Rather, as Matthew himself says, this book is about his life, a transcribing of thirty-two years of journals, a book that bears witness to his first fifty years and holds him accountable for his own destiny. It's good reading and thoroughly entertaining.
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