I received a copy of Greenlights included in the price of the ticket I purchased for a virtual Q&A between Matthew McConaughey and Ethan Hawke as one of the keynote events of the Texas Book Festival this year. At no more than ten to fifteen pages in, as much as I was already enjoying the book, I realised I needed to hear him tell this story. My purchase of the audiobook may go down as the single greatest purchase of my life. Nothing compares to McConaughey on McConaughey. Lovers of a slow, Southern drawl will be in heaven.
The concept of Greenlights, and the origin of the title, is that greenlights tell us to continue along our path, both in traffic as well as in life. We like finding a greenlight, though we recognise finding a greenlight is a combination of both skill and luck. McConaughey also talks about how sometimes we come to red lights or yellow lights, but these can ultimately become greenlights. It may be a matter of timing, perhaps we needed our attention drawn to something before we proceed, or maybe even a bit of a detour. The idea though, is to look at how we see challenges in life, and how we respond to them, because that is up to the individual and that has everything to do with the outcome we get.
Using this concept, McConaughey looks back over his first 50 years and illustrates how some of his red lights turned green and how he has always kept his eyes open for the next green light. There are journal entries, poems written in junior high, and bumper sticker slogans throughout, but this is primarily a memoir full of engaging stories.
From his early home life with parents who divorced each other twice and married each other three times, to the chance meeting in a bar that led to his first role (as Wooderson in Dazed and Confused), his explosion into stardom following the release of A Time To Kill, the Rom-Com era he fell into, to his resurgence in popularity with projects like True Detective and Dallas Buyers Club that culminated in his Best Actor Oscar, we learn what else was going on in his life and in his mind, and how he coped with, and at times even orchestrated, the various highs and lows. Much of his personal life is also examined, from the lows, such as the infamous arrest in Austin, Texas when he was naked and playing the bongo drums, to the highs of meeting his wife and the births of each of their children. The reader gets the sense throughout that this is a man who has truly opened up about what he has learned in his time on this planet.
The physical book has photographs that obviously someone listening to the audio version will not see. With the audio version, McConaughey tells these stories with the charisma of Buster Moon (Sing), the sincerity of Jake Brigance (A Time to Kill), and on occasion the philosophical melancholy of Rustin Cohle (True Detective). But there is undoubtedly a “feel good” quality to the entire book. In the world we are living in today, this is just the right book to sit down with, and exhale.
Greenlights is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
Will you be picking up Greenlights? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
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.
