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Greenlights
Summary
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 50 years, been trying to work out its riddle for 42 and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last 35. 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 what you hold now: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is 50 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.
Critic reviews
"Unflinchingly honest and remarkably candid, Matthew McConaughey's book invites us to grapple with the lessons of his life as he did - and to see that the point was never to win, but to understand." (Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck)
"McConaughey is a talented actor and a fine writer, but a total genius at living. He attacks life with an exhilarating ferocity. This is a wildly unexpected and delightful book you can't just read, you have to experience." (Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October)
"It shouldn't surprise you that this book is good, but it will surprise you just how good it is. Wise and entertaining, this is an inspiring memoir and how-to from one of the great outlaw philosophers and artists of our time." (Ryan Holiday, author of The Daily Stoic)