Greenlights

Description

Greenlights is a memoir, written by the American actor Matthew McConaughey and published in 2020. It has been very popular, and it’s quite different from the usual celebrity life story.

How it came about: For about thirty-five years, McConaughey kept diaries, filling notebooks with stories, thoughts, poems and lessons learned. When he decided to write a book, he went off alone to a remote cabin for a stretch of time to read back through them all and see what they added up to.

The idea behind the title: Think of driving along and hitting one red light after another, which is how difficult times can feel. His idea is that you can learn to turn the yellow and red lights in your life into green ones, either by changing how you respond to them or by finding the lesson in them. The book is his attempt to show how he’s tried to do that.

What’s in it:

• His childhood in a small Texas town, with a strong-willed, no-nonsense mother and a larger-than-life father. His parents’ marriage is one of the book’s more astonishing stories.
• His time as a young exchange student in Australia, and his early days of drifting into acting, including the role in Dazed and Confused that brought him his famous catchphrase.
• The years he was typecast in romantic comedies, and his decision to turn down roles and wait until he was offered more serious ones. That patience led to some of his finest work and eventually an Oscar.
• His travels, including to Africa and South America, and his marriage and fatherhood.
• Short pieces of advice sprinkled throughout, which he calls things like “bumper stickers.”