Yet he doesn’t complain about disadvantage. His parents divorced and remarried each other twice, he was subject to corporal punishment and money was always an issue. Part memoir, part life guide and part ethic Greenlights is worth reading for many beyond McConaughey’s fan base basically anyone who likes a good man’s man adventure story.īorn into the lower middle class in East Texas, McConaughey looks back nostalgically at a childhood few would envy. Kind of a mashup of Anthony Bourdain with Ernest Hemingway, McConaughey tells stories with the aplomb of accomplished raconteur. Greenlights is a remarkable first book from an already renowned artist. The short dust jacket included with this hardcover edition is an intentional design choice. It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights-and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too. 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. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. 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. 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.

Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud.

1 celebrity memoir of the past 10 years.”- USA Today “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 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. Discover the life-changing memoir that has inspired millions of readers through the Academy Award®–winning actor’s unflinching honesty, unconventional wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction.

Green lights book