Recent Reads: Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey 

Publisher: Crown

Publication Date:  October 20, 2020

 

Format: Audioboon
Source: Bought/Own from Audible

Rating:


Goodreads Synopsis: 

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.

Review: 

This was Matthew McConaughey's book about his life so far. I listened to it with my partner on the way to work. It is read by the author, which made it more enjoyable. 

He seems so human from this book, it was refreshing but he is also well-off now so some of his 'bumper-sticker' moments and 'proclamations' were a bit meh for those of us in the non-well off categories. 

Overall, this was a fun listen though. Matthew talks about his life, growing up, what he learned along the way and his adventure to becoming who he is as an actor. I found him funny and relatable at times, and you can really sense that he loves life and lives it to the fullest at every opportunity. He is an interesting man, a pro bull-shitter, and so passionate.  "Greenlights" were his move forward moments in life, leading him and guiding him along. I loved that this was the view point he had. 

I loved that he told his story. I appreciate that some of his best lines were improved and that he tried to be the characters wholeheartedly, even to his detriment at times. He found his dream in more ways that one and that was a fun journey to go on him with.

All that said, I would have liked less proclamation and bumper sticker moments. 1. because he often yelled them in the audio and it was a lot and 2. because sometimes they were just not obtainable things for 'normal' non-famous people. If you already like Matthew in movies and his weird vibe, I think you will enjoy this one and I do recommend the audio version.