Greenlights

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What to expect

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.

The audiobook now includes an exclusive interview with Matthew McConaughey which was recorded during his book tour in 2021.

(P)2020 Penguin Random House LLC

Critics Review

Unflinchingly honest and remarkably candid, Matthew McConaughey's book invites us to grapple with the lessons of his life as he did - and to see that the point was never to win, but to understand.
Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
McConaughey is a talented actor and a fine writer, but a total genius at living. He attacks life with an exhilarating ferocity. This is a wildly unexpected and delightful book you can't just read, you have to experience.
Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October
It shouldn't surprise you that this book is good, but it will surprise you just how good it is. Wise and entertaining, this is an inspiring memoir and how-to from one of the great outlaw philosophers and artists of our time.
Ryan Holiday, author of The Daily Stoic
A Renaissance man on the big screen, McConaughey shows he is the same on the page. Mystical and spiritual but mostly just wonderful, Greenlights is an inspired memoir that celebrates the idea that it's the journey rather than the destination that will fulfill us.
Michael Connelly, author of Fair Warning
Written with great intensity and rare candor, Greenlights is a whirlwind of wisdom that's as singular and fervent as its author. Read the book, experience the behind-the-scenes adventures, then pursue your own greenlights full throttle.
Shaka Smart, head coach, menu2019s basketball, The University of Texas at Austin
Greenlights is many different books at once: an entertaining autobiography, a delightful adventure story, a very funny comedy, a wise self-help guide, an inspiring argument for love and family, and a candid tale of spiritual and personal discovery. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, co-author of Conscious Leadership
A brilliant memoir that lays bare everything
The Times
A rollicking, contemplative trip
Financial Times
Greenlights is not a memoir, though it tells true stories from his life in chronological order. Nor is it 'an advice book'. It is 'an approach book', bringing together McConaughey's insights from 35 years of writing journals, and more of collecting bumper stickers.
Guardian
Mixing philosophy, 'teachable moments', self-help and Kerouac-inspired memoir, [Greenlights] takes in his remarkable career, finding love and stardom.
Sunday Independent
The Hollywood Star interprets himself. There is derring-do, dope, mayhem and mishaps.
The Times - The Perfect Audiobooks for Lockdown
Enjoyably quirky
Hello!
Gloriously bonkers
Guardian - Best Autobiographies and Memoirs of 2020
a wild ride through his memories
Evening Standard
His not-quite-memoir offers a smorgasbord of life lessons, anecdotes . . . It would be hard to finish the book and not warm to its author.
The Observer

User Reviews

Book 4.0
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4.0
Interesting in parts but too noisy plus didn't flow particularly well
nanajac 23/03/2023

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