Greenlights - Rambling Readers

304 pages

English language

Published Nov. 12, 2020 by Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale.

ISBN:: 978-0-593-13913-4

(1 review)

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 …

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.

12 editions

stozzer reviewed Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

Rollickingly true to the blurb

4 stars

McConaughey's recent memoir. The blurb on my copy promised a certain level of buccaneering content. The experience was a pleasantly surprising adventure of madder than fiction whimsical wanderings, philosophy and a refreshingly chaotic approach to career-management. His parents and siblings also deserve a nod of recognition for being truly memorable people in their own right.

Memoirs frequently don't live up to the mystique of the teller, but this categorically does not happen here. There is close to the bone honesty that is difficult to exercise skepticism for given how frankly the writing comes across. Given some of the subject matter, I struggle to picture what content discussions had to have crossed between him and any editor. I want to believe there was no ghost writer involved too, as the delivery is just edgy and rough enough around the edges that it does feel genuinely our guy's own words.

I don't …

McConaughey's recent memoir. The blurb on my copy promised a certain level of buccaneering content. The experience was a pleasantly surprising adventure of madder than fiction whimsical wanderings, philosophy and a refreshingly chaotic approach to career-management. His parents and siblings also deserve a nod of recognition for being truly memorable people in their own right.

Memoirs frequently don't live up to the mystique of the teller, but this categorically does not happen here. There is close to the bone honesty that is difficult to exercise skepticism for given how frankly the writing comes across. Given some of the subject matter, I struggle to picture what content discussions had to have crossed between him and any editor. I want to believe there was no ghost writer involved too, as the delivery is just edgy and rough enough around the edges that it does feel genuinely our guy's own words.

I don't like to skip any content if I plan to finish a book, but a few of the scrapbook-style philosophy pages should only be glanced off for full effect. Either way, I thank the author for adding "mensch" to my lexicon and throw it right back at him.