Greenlights
Raucous stories and outlaw wisdom from the Academy Award-winning actor
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4.3 • 331 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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 realising that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.
Good luck.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
It only makes sense that an iconoclast like Matthew McConaughey would take the basic idea of an autobiography and make it all his own. Part memoir, part self-help manifesto, Greenlights finds the actor sharing some of the most intimate, illuminating and hilarious moments from his life and career. McConaughey draws inspiring lessons from his blue-collar Texas childhood, his father’s tragic passing while in bed with McConaughey’s mother and his history of sexy dreams that seem to prophesy big life moments like meeting his wife. We especially loved getting an inside look at how the Hollywood star prepares for his movies—did you know his iconic “Alright, alright, alright” from Dazed and Confused was ad-libbed during a costume fitting? In print, McConaughey comes across as every bit the charming rogue he so often plays on screen, but he’s also a masterful storyteller. Greenlights proves that, at least in McConaughey’s case, real life truly is stranger than fiction.
Customer Reviews
Curiosity got me
This book kept me reading because I was genuinely curious about Matthew’s progression as an actor. It was an easy read. Sometimes really enthralling. He comes across as arrogant, yet humble. Some of his stories really gave me perspective. It isn’t the best book ever written, no. But it was the first book I’ve read in less than a fortnight since having my son - reading only at night. And that’s saying something! Worth a shot!
Greenlights
Fabulously written, which has made it my quickest book to read this year! Couldn’t put it down. Just wanted to get to know Matthew McConaughey more and more! Love the way he’s lived his life and told his story. Thanks for sharing Mr McConaughey.
Inspirational
Very insightful, interesting and well written
A great book