Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

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 realising that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too. Good luck.

5* for the narrator though

A serious collections of a man's life stories and a good load of relatable quotes.

I'm starting to see a theme (a very expected theme) amongst celebrity memoirs: self-aggrandizement disguised in humble origin stories and a false sense of modesty. This book fits the theme.

I'd put this somewhere between memoir and tall tale. As in, I don't believe half the shit he said he did. A German dude lending him a motorcycle for free to ride through Europe, only to not care when he totaled it? Drinking two shots of tequila and running 5 miles barefoot in the sand in 108 degree heat and wrestling cows until he got knocked out by a bull to prepare for a movie? Challenging the village champion in a remote African village, who then walked him 15 miles to the next village by foot after he earned his respect? Cmon.

I listened to the audiobook, read by the author, which I think made it more strange. He was clearly performing the whole time which, sure, makes sense – but also made him seem more detached from reality and just a little unhinged. Especially the laughing. What was with the laughing? Also, he's kind of a weird guy. I'd expect this from many other celebrities, like, IDK, Adam Driver? It's clear that he sees himself as an artist (which, okay, he kind of is). He clearly fancies himself a poet.

Then there were other things that didn't make sense. He kept yelling out, “Prescription!” “Bumper sticker!” “Note to self!” – followed by some aphorism or other (and that strange chuckle), the purpose of which I didn't quite understand because they weren't really prescriptions or bumper stickers or notes to self. I think he just wanted a reason to yell out his apothegms.

If this is meant to be read more like family lore than it is truth, so be it. I suppose it's interesting, and regardless of what's true and what isn't, the dude has lived a pretty fascinating life. I think he's a fine dude and I do quite like several of his movies – I think he's a talented actor. I just couldn't get past his own self-regard.