Greenlights

Gloriously bonkers - Guardian, Best Autobiographies and Memoirs of 2020

A rollicking, contemplative trip - Financial Times

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.

In Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey takes readers on an audacious and insightful journey through his life and career, sharing his personal philosophies and adventures. Drawing from his diaries and personal reflections compiled over thirty-five years, McConaughey offers not just an autobiography, but a guide to understanding both the wild and contemplative aspects of life. The narrative weaves through high-energy anecdotes, profound life lessons, and whimsical moments, painted with McConaughey's unique brand of charm and wit.

“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.”

Through these explorations, readers will discover McConaughey’s perceptions of reality and his pragmatic advice on navigating the world. He finds themes that have given him deep satisfaction and encourages others to recognize the signals that the universe sends our way—those "greenlights" that propel us forward.

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.'

McConaughey's narrative traverses through fifty years of personal anecdotes, from the profound to the hilarious. It's a chronicle of his adventures and misadventures, capturing moments of triumph and lessons learned through failure. With the same frankness and often irreverent wisdom that has characterized his acting career, McConaughey delivers tales from Hollywood, his upbringing in Texas, and soul-searching travels around the world.

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.

With a blend of humour and honest reflection, he doles out what he describes as "medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary," offering a perspective on grabbing hold of life and riding through its ups and downs.

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.