Wednesday, February 24, 2021
Review - Greenlights
AUTHOR: Matthew McConaughey
RATING: ★★★★
Summary (from 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.
REVIEW: It’s been a long time since I read an autobiography because I normally gravitate towards fiction. I will gladly admit the handsome face on the cover is the initial reason I was so drawn to this book. Plus, Matthew McConaughey is one of my favorite actors. I knew if his talent for writing was anything like his acting talent that he would be an awesome storyteller, and I was right. Matthew is very straightforward in his autobiography, and I appreciated that. He doesn’t beat around the bush. When you read about his highs and lows, you can tell it’s genuine. I don't picture him as overly concerned about the reader being shocked or appalled at his life story, and I like that. My opinion is, if you’re going to take a leap of faith and write your autobiography then lay all the cards on the table. Don’t hold anything back, and Matthew did exactly that. I learned so many new things about him while reading this book, and his honesty and transparency was refreshing. I would recommend it.
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