matthew mcconaughey book review guardian

clock This article was published more than  3 years ago

Matthew McConaughey is ‘alright, alright, alright’ — and thinks you will be too

Matthew McConaughey’s memoir, “ Greenlights ,” has a way of convincing you that being Matthew McConaughey is just about the easiest thing in the world. Look at his filmography, and you’ll see an actor who gutted his way to critical and commercial success: He started with cameos and low-budget indies in the ’90s, labored in the rom-com salt mines in the early aughts, then pivoted to Oscar bait and prestige TV, finally reaching the mountaintop with a best actor Academy Award for “ Dallas Buyers Club ” in 2014.

That’s an achievement. But the man who made a meme out of Nietzsche’s notion that “time is a flat circle” isn’t going to tell a simple story about hard work and steady forward progress. By his reckoning, his fame wasn’t so much about raw ambition as much as it was with being preternaturally “alright, alright, alright” with everything, every step of the way.

Take a break from it all by heading to a monastery or RVing for three years? Perfect: “Driving the highways of America has always been my ideal office.”

Take a break from taking a break with a long debauch at the Chateau Marmont? That’s perfect, too: “I took a lot of showers in the daylight hours, rarely alone. I partook.”

Jerry Seinfeld’s ‘Is This Anything?’ charts his life as a comedian, one bit at a time

Cash in for a bit and make dreck like “The Wedding Planner”? It’s all good: “I enjoyed being able to give people a ninety-minute breezy romantic getaway from the stress of their lives.”

Change course, demand juicier roles and launch the McConaissance? Gotta do you, man: “I’d been going to bed with an itchy butt, waking up with a stinky finger for long enough,” he writes, probably not plagiarizing Sir Laurence Olivier’s autobiography.

McConaughey’s self-effacing slacker-cool attitude, which lets him casually drop a few thousand on the hapless Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl, has made him an ideal masculine movie hero for our anxious moment. The world is on fire, but he has got you; he’s our mindful-breathing Brando. That has made him ripe for satire — his gnomic musings in car ads practically begged for it. A great thing about “Greenlights” is that the persona never sounds like a put-on. The bad thing, though, is that he obviously wrote it himself and seems certain that in addition to being a memoirist he’s also a certified motivational speaker and, worse, a poet.

McConaughey, who will turn 51 in November, recalls growing up in rural Texas, the son of parents who married three times and divorced twice. His father was a pugnacious character. A pipe salesman and onetime draftee of the Green Bay Packers, he would recruit Matthew’s brother for a urinating contest and once whipped up a scheme to have Matthew claim emotional distress from a breakout-inducing skin cream, a ruse undone when he was presented with a photo naming him the most handsome man at his high school. Later, McConaughey’s dad would fulfill his dream of dying while having sex, and how could McConaughey not be inspired by that kind of temperament? “Yes, he called his shot all right,” McConaughey writes.

His first major film role was fittingly quirky: A chance meeting with the casting director of “ Dazed and Confused ” in a hotel bar led to him to the role of Wooderson, the 20-something still stuck on chasing high school girls. It’s where he uttered that first “alright, alright, alright” — “the very first words I said on the very first night of a job I had that I thought would be nothing but a hobby, but turned into a career.”

He’s glad that people have taken up “alright, alright, alright” as a mantra, but then McConaughey seemingly never met a mantra he didn’t like. In college, he stumbled upon “ The Greatest Salesman in the World ,” a 1968 book by the author Og Mandino, whose work is a bottomless resource for Successories posters and #MondayMotivation posts. Mandino’s ethos of positivity and persistence transformed McConaughey, which is to his credit. Alas, it also means he wants to try his hand at it, too, and “Greenlights” is stuffed with vaporous, circular proverbs for would-be McConaugheys: “All Prodigals once Pharisee, All Pharisees once Prodigal,” “I am good at what I love, I don’t love all that I’m good at,” “the arrow doesn’t seek the target, the target draws the arrow,” “I was remembered by being forgotten.”

A fortune cookie might have written much of “Greenlights,” if a fortune cookie had starred in “Interstellar.”

McConaughey’s pronouncements all feed into his core philosophy of what he calls “livin”: “There’s no ‘g’ on the end of livin because life is a verb,” he insists, which is a reasonable way to understand life, if not gerunds. Throughout “Greenlights,” the doctrine of “livin” manifests itself through aphorisms, bumper stickers and poetry, the last of which is uniformly cringeworthy. He makes no grand claims to literary greatness, but that hardly removes the sting of bad puns (“Fish for yourself. / Self-ish.”), Dr. Seuss-isms (“I swallow vitamins with a beer I do, / chew more tobacco than I ought to”) or poems where the title alone should put you off reading further (“Today I Made Love to My Woman”).

More book reviews and recommendations

Be it through memoir or Instapoetry, McConaughey pushes an ethos of learning to take your hands off the wheel. The “Greenlights” of the title refers to moments when the universe gives us permission to do new things; reds and yellows are the things that stand in our way. McConaughey has obviously navigated this successfully, but his wisdom isn’t exactly transferrable. Might I, too, refuse lucrative romantic lead roles till better scripts come along? Or hike through a rainforest on Ecstasy and float naked on the Amazon River because an erotic-dream-slash-nightmare told me to?

Following the lead of his first connection in Hollywood, who told McConaughey he would get the work he wants when he stopped wanting it so much, McConaughey’s most cherished advice is non-advice. “I believe everything we do in life is part of a plan,” he writes. “Sometimes the plan goes as intended, and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s part of the plan.” Some plan.

But the McConaughey effect is that you can’t be too annoyed at McConaughey — seeker, world traveler, naked bongo player turned well-meaning family man. (He’s married with three kids, another one of those good-things-happen-when-you-stop-seeking-them things.) So, on a scale of “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” to “True Detective,” I figure “Greenlights” is a solid “Magic Mike” — simply structured, a little flashy, but not as insightful as it wants you to think it is. The lengthy bio at the end of “Greenlights” states that McConaughey is “a very intentional man.” But the intentions are largely a mystery to all but the man himself.

Mark Athitakis is a critic in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”

GREENLIGHTS

By Matthew McConaughey

Crown. 304 pp. $30

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

Matthew McConaughey Wrote the Book on Matthew McConaughey

In his memoir, “Greenlights,” the star of “Dazed and Confused” and “Dallas Buyers Club” shares lessons from a life in which he turned out all right, all right, all right.

Matthew McConaughey knows there are people who think, “Gosh dang, McConaughey just eases right into everything.” He said he wrote “Greenlights” partly as a corrective. Credit... Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times

Supported by

• Share full article

By Dave Itzkoff

• Oct. 14, 2020

Would it surprise you to learn that more than 30 years ago, before he’d even sauntered across the screen in “Dazed and Confused,” Matthew McConaughey wrote a poem in which he vowed he’d someday become an author?

As one of its lopsided verses declared:

I think I’ll write a book. A word about my life. I wonder who would give a damn About the pleasures and the strife?

This was in 1989, when he didn’t know all the twists and turns that awaited him — the acting awards he’d win, the wife and children he’d have, the bracing dramas and banal rom-coms he’d make. But he was certain he would live a life worth chronicling.

Now that poem, rendered in its creator’s arcane handwriting, appears at the start of his autobiography, “Greenlights,” which Crown will publish on Tuesday.

The book offers a shotgun seat to all the l-i-v-i-n that McConaughey has accumulated, from his upbringing in a tumultuous Texas family to his ascent as the ruggedly serene star of “Magic Mike,” “True Detective” and “Dallas Buyers Club.”

McConaughey, who turns 51 on Nov. 4, enjoys spinning some of these personal yarns, not necessarily because they sound cool but because he believes they reveal certain universal and teachable truths.

To that end, “Greenlights” is filled with homespun wisdom that McConaughey has wrung from his toils, travels and that time he got arrested while playing bongos in the nude . He has fortified his remembrances with the coinages and maxims he dutifully recorded in decades’ worth of personal journals and which continue to spill naturally from his mouth.

It is a book that is constantly evaluating itself and its reasons for being, much like its author. He acknowledges that he entered into the project both eagerly and warily, looking to use his celebrity for the opportunity to tell his story in his own idiosyncratic way.

“I get what equity I bring as Matthew McConaughey, however you see me,” he said in a Zoom conversation last month. He spoke from a den in his home in Austin, Texas, wearing his hair swept back and a flannel shirt that was only partly buttoned up as he peered into his webcam through a pair of horn-rimmed eyeglasses.

“If it’s a straight memoir” — he stressed the second syllable with an unexpected French flair — “as a publisher you could sell some books.” What he hoped to produce, he said, was one where “the words on the page are still worthy to share if they were signed by anonymous, but at the same time be a book that only McConaughey could’ve wrote.”

Like the bestubbled dude you have seen whooping it up at WWE matches and sermonizing in luxury car commercials, McConaughey is alternately uninhibited and self-serious. He is comfortable referring to himself in the third person and dismisses any suggestion that he has stumbled backward into his professional success.

As he told me, he knows there are people who think, “Gosh dang, McConaughey just eases right into everything — the guy doesn’t seem to have any bumps, doesn’t get hit crossing the road.” He said he wrote “Greenlights” partly as a corrective to this perception, to show how much effort it has taken to get where he is.

But McConaughey wants readers to look beyond the boldface name on its cover and focus on its fundamental message. No one can escape hardship, he said, but he can share the lessons “that helped me navigate the hard stuff — like I say, ‘get relative with the inevitable’ — sooner and in the best way possible for myself.”

Codifying his beliefs and putting them down on paper was one test. The next challenge comes as McConaughey releases “Greenlights” into a world that feels increasingly unsettled and dismissive of values systems — one where, like millions of Americans, he and his family have spent the past several months spent “trying to outrun the ol’ Covid,” as he put it.

“I’m still continuously testing and updating my philosophies, practically daily,” he said. “And I can do better at a lot of them.”

As McConaughey tells the story, his youth was dominated by his father, Jim, a former college and professional football player turned pipe salesman who was married three times to and twice divorced from the actor’s mother, Kay. The book’s first chapter dramatizes a scene from 1974 where McConaughey watched the couple fight ferociously — his mother having broken his father’s nose with a telephone while he brandished a ketchup bottle — before his parents had sex on the kitchen floor.

It sounds brutal and, as McConaughey told me, “This is the reality, but there’s humanity in that reality.” Jim was tough on his sons, too, but, McConaughey, who is the youngest of three brothers, said, “I wouldn’t give back one ass-whupping I got for the values that are ingrained in me.” When he reflects on his parents, McConaughey said, “The love was real. The passion was real.” (A few days after McConaughey started filming “Dazed and Confused,” Jim died of a heart attack while making love to Kay.)

Kay McConaughey, now 88, said in an email that as she raised Matthew, she did not necessarily expect him to become an artist. “In fact, that subject was never brought up,” she said. “I thought he was going to be a lawyer.”

Even so, she said that she often observed Matthew “jotting things down on small pieces of paper about what someone had said or what he thought about what was being said or a way he saw life.”

Having read “Greenlights” and seen how Matthew depicted her relationship with Jim, Kay McConaughey said, “It was a rocky and passionate love affair we had, but I do wish Matthew would have told more of the stories about me and his dad’s love, affection and commitment to each other.”

Still, she said, she regarded her youngest son as a fundamentally forthright person. “What has remained consistent in Matthew’s life is his honesty and being true to himself, knowing who he was and owning it.”

Matthew McConaughey recounts how he landed his breakthrough role as the likable sleaze Wooderson in “Dazed and Confused” by tracking down the film’s casting director, Don Phillips, in an Austin bar and charming his way into an audition . A few years later, the not-yet-bankable actor mounted a successful campaign to persuade the director Joel Schumacher to cast him in a leading role in his adaptation of “A Time to Kill.”

To McConaughey, stories like these illustrate how he is not content to merely let life happen to him. “It’s always been obvious to me that I do not have a laissez-faire attitude,” he said. “It’s a state of being that I work at, continuously, daily, and I break a sweat to get it.”

Longtime colleagues say it’s even more than that: Despite the agreeably disheveled image that McConaughey projects, they see him as someone who is perpetually preparing himself for opportunities and actively steering himself toward them.

As his friend Richard Linklater, who directed him in several films including “Dazed and Confused,” explained to me, “People underestimate the utter intentionality of what Matthew’s done. He’s really good at going from A to B to C. He’s got a plan and he’s just brave enough and brazen enough to execute it.”

The point of the “Dazed and Confused” audition story isn’t that McConaughey simply happened to be in the right place at the right time, Linklater said: “He wasn’t discovered in a bar — he went over to the guy who he heard was casting it. Matthew’s always playing the long game.”

In “Greenlights,” McConaughey tells the back stories of some of his best-known roles, but he does not take a film-by-film inventory of his entire career. Nor does he share any particularly salacious details from his personal life when he was still a single man, beyond a paragraph in which he writes: “I wore the leathers. I rode the Thunderbird. I took a lot of showers in the daylight hours, rarely alone. I partook.”

McConaughey told me that while such scenes are generally staples of celebrity tell-alls, he felt that to include them “would be in bad taste and bad manners — that’s why bedrooms have doors on ’em.”

However, he does unhesitatingly share two different stories in which he awakens from wet dreams — you read that right — where he saw himself “floating downstream on my back in the Amazon River” while surrounded by jungle life and “African tribesmen lined up shoulder to shoulder on the ridge to the left of me.” He interpreted these visions as subconscious exhortations to travel to Peru, where he immersed himself in the Amazon, and to Mali, where he sparred with a local wrestling champion.

Sections like these shed light on the transcendental side of the author, who is a practicing Methodist but also describes himself as “an optimistic mystic,” forever fine-tuning his personal dials in search of further broadcasts from the universe.

That approach to existence has sent McConaughey hunting for what he calls “greenlights” — the traffic signals that mean go, which he prefers to spell as a single word and which he believes take skill and acumen to identify.

To conclude that life is all about luck, he said, is to surrender to fatalism: “Quit letting yourself off the hook, McConaughey. If that’s true, then run every red light. You’ve got your hands on the wheel. You’re making choices. They matter.”

McConaughey said he has no interest in being anyone’s spiritual guru and did not approach “Greenlights” as a work of self-help. Friends say that yes, this is really how he talks and that his book is one more way that he is trying to express himself.

“It’s his way of wanting to be heard on another level,” Linklater said. “It’s another level of communication that you can’t get in a role.”

Linklater explained that actors like McConaughey are vulnerable in their work: “They don’t have total control,” he said. “Even the most powerful actors — Denzel Washington, Daniel Day-Lewis — are still at the mercy of the parts they’re being offered. Actors need these other outlets.”

Sometimes McConaughey dispenses wisdom in miniature pearls, like the beloved bumper stickers he has reproduced throughout the book that sport pithy phrases like “Educate before you indict,” “I am good at what I love, I don’t love all that I’m good at” and “If you’re high enough, the sun’s always shining.”

And sometimes he expounds at greater length, like when I asked him how he appears to stay out of America’s toxic culture wars and cultivates liberal and conservative fans alike.

“I’m trying to keep in with it and not out of it,” McConaughey replied. “For those people who say there’s nothing but yellow lines and dead armadillos in the middle of the highway, I say to you this: the armadillos are just fine. Because the right and the left are so far out, they’re not even on the asphalt anymore. They’re in the frickin’ desert.”

He gave a raspy laugh and added, “Man, I’ll meet you in the middle.”

Getting “Greenlights” onto the page did not happen quite so swiftly. Crown had its eye on McConaughey as far back as 2015, when the actor went viral with a commencement speech he gave at the University of Houston , structured around his aphorisms (“Don’t leave crumbs”; “Dissect your successes”; “A roof is a man-made thing”).

A proposal that McConaughey later circulated to several publishing houses “had less story and more of the lessons and philosophy in it,” said Gillian Blake, senior vice president and editor in chief of Crown. But in further conversations with him, Blake said that McConaughey did not need much encouragement to turn a retrospective lens on himself.

“We had a few long in-person meetings where you’d ask him a question and he’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, I got a story about that,’” she said. “And then he went back home and wrote it all down.”

McConaughey said that he had already prepared for the writing process by reviewing the diaries and journals he has kept since he was a teenager. He said he did not work with a co-author on “Greenlights” but got some needed motivation from his wife, Camila Alves McConaughey.

“All of a sudden, my wife was like, ‘Get in the truck, load up your food, water and tequila, and don’t come back until you’ve got something,’” he recalled. “So, bam , I called a friend with a cabin and hit the desert.”

Since then, though, McConaughey, his wife and their three children have been living a sequestered life during what the actor calls “Covid times.” McConaughey said he is a cooperative mask-wearer and social-distancer, but he could not help worrying about reopened schools and sports events leading to a rise of infections. “We may see this completely backfire,” he said.

It is both a propitious and a terrible time to be plugging a book about how the experiences of a Hollywood movie star can improve your life. And while McConaughey has reorganized himself for several weeks’ worth of virtual promotion, his greater concerns are maintaining his family’s welfare and keeping his own head on straight.

In some moments he tried to alleviate his existential dread with humor. “Everyone’s in a bit of a pickle, and it’s not a little gherkin,” he said. “It’s one of those big two-pounders you get at a roadside truck stop.”

Then he would abruptly describe the situation in starker terms: “We’re going back to our most barbaric selves,” he said.

But — to use an adage that McConaughey might endorse — he tried to light a candle in the darkness and find some optimism at an otherwise dire time. “Could this actually be a banner year, where things got started?” he asked. “Where we got cleansed? A little evolution would be nice.”

Follow New York Times Books on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram , sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar . And listen to us on the Book Review podcast .

Dave Itzkoff is a culture reporter whose latest book, “Robin,” a biography of Robin Williams, was published in May 2018. More about Dave Itzkoff

Matthew McConaughey Shares 3 Books That Made a Difference

The actor looks back on books that made a lasting impression.

Our editors handpick the products that we feature. We may earn commission from the links on this page.

Just Because

“It was a diddy, a song that I woke up with in my head—I got up and just started writing it down,” he says. “Just because they threw the dart doesn’t mean that it stuck. And just because I’ve got some skills don’t mean there is no luck—I just started writing all these couplets. It was stuff that my own children had been talking to me and their mother about—things that they’re confused about, frustrated about trying to figure out.”

McConaughey says he hopes the book will help facilitate meaningful chats between parents and their kids. “It’s a way to have digestible, easy conversations with our kids that may otherwise be hard to have,” he says. As McConaughey releases a book he hopes will make a difference, we asked him to reflect on some of the books that have had the biggest impact on him. Here’s what he said.

The Greatest Salesman in the World

“Sometimes we seek books—and sometimes they just find us. This book found me when I was at the University of Texas, at a time when I was really struggling with what my career path was going to be. I was a liberal arts and psychology major. I was going to become a lawyer. I had been kind of not sleeping well with the idea of being a lawyer, and I was like, I think I want to go into the storytelling business. But the idea of being behind or in front of the camera was just foreign to me. I was at a friend’s house, and this book was under a stack of Sports Illustrated s and Playboy s. I picked it up and read the prologue. I went to my friend who was sleeping in his bedroom—he had been up all night cramming for an exam—and I said, “Hey, can I borrow this book?” And he, kind of groggy, woke up, and he looked at it and he goes, “No, you can have it.” He goes, “My dad gave that to me, and he told me to hand it off to someone who needed it later in life. That’s yours.” That book helped me form an identity. It gave me confidence and courage to make the choice. It was only two weeks later that I called my father and said, “I don't want to go to law school. I want to go to film school.”

Self-Reliance and Other Essays

“Emerson’s essays, Self-Reliance and The Over-Soul in particular, also made a major impact on my life and my confidence. They were such a lightning bolt in my life that I could read two lines and I’d have to shut the book and go, Whoa, I got to take a walk for a few days and try to put this philosophy out there and see what kind of reverb I get back from the world . Self-Reliance is like 17 pages, and it took me two months to read it.”

Holy Bible, King James Version

“The Bible has been very important to me. I’m the last one to forgive myself. Check out Ecclesiastes if you have this affliction. Ecclesiastes taught me empathy and forgiveness. The times when I think maybe everything I’m doing needs to be so important, it reminds me, hey, there’s a season for everything, and you need the ebb and the flow. You need the dark and the light. You’ll fail, and you’ll succeed. And that’s the rhythm. There’s time for everything. So it really lets the air out of the pressure that I’ll put on myself.”

Bethany Heitman has spent 15 years producing content for women; she is the former editor-in-chief of PeopleStyle and has held senior leadership positions at Cosmopolitan and Seventeen . She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York

Best New Books of Spring

30 Greatest-Ever Romance Novels

Need to Take a Big, Scary Leap? Read This

The Best Anne Lamott Quotes

The Most Addictive Reads of All Time

You Can Run, but You Can’t Hide

Lara Love Hardin’s Remarkable Journey

These New Novels Make the Perfect Backyard Reads

Books that Will Put You to Sleep

The Other Secret Life of Lara Love Hardin

The Best Quotes from Oprah’s 104th Book Club Pick

Book review: Candid, lively memoir from Matthew McConaughey

"Greenlights"

Author: Matthew McConaughey

Crown, 289 pages, $30

If you’re curious to know when Matthew McConaughey first used his signature phrase, “Alright, alright, alright,” you’ve come to the right book. It amuses him that people still follow him around 28 years later and say those words to him and tattoo them on their body. They were among the first words he ever said on film, as the character of Wooderson in one of his earliest movies, “Dazed and Confused.”

On track to become a lawyer, he decided a life in law courts wasn’t for him, so he traded school texts for movie scripts and started auditioning to the accompaniment of many rounds of “Sorry, no thank yous.” About switching careers, his father told him, “Well …don’t half-ass it.” He didn’t.

McConaughey’s first big movie was “A Time to Kill.” He nailed a part in the film, but he wanted the lead and only the lead. Casting took a chance with McConaughey. He read for the role of Jake Brigance and got the role. He said, “I ran off into the night until I was about a mile away from anyone. Then, with tears in my eyes. I dropped to my knees, faced that full moon, extended my right hand up to it, and said, ‘Thank you.’”

With that role his world changed. But his newfound success did not come easily. He did not know how to “Navigate the decadence of my success, much less believe it was mine to enjoy.” It was after he had been a bank teller, boat mechanic, photo processor, barrister’s assistant, construction worker and assistant golf pro that he finally signed up with a talent agency. They asked him, “You ever play baseball?” Yes, he said, he did for 12 years. Two weeks later he found himself playing baseball in “Angels in the Outfield” for 10 weeks. With only $1,200 left in the bank, he was paid $48,000.

A production company had him stay for 18 months at the ultrachic Chateau Marmont hotel in Beverly Hills, and gave him a check for $150,000 to pay the hotel bill. He was equally happy in bars, trailer camps, a jail (where he was set free for $50), and taking solo three-week-trips to Peru, floating naked on his back down the Amazon River.

Eventually he tired of doing romantic comedies, so he swore off rom-coms and turned down any script that he deemed “light fare.” But at about that time, Hollywood was starting as many productions as possible because a walkout was looming. He played the lead opposite Jennifer Lopez in “The Wedding Planner.” He followed that with the fiery role of Denton Van Zan in “Reign of Fire,” who was “a cigar-gnawing, apocalyptic, badass dragon slayer that ate the heart of every dragon he slayed.”

After being in excellent physical condition and playing “Magic Mike,” he accepted the role of Ron Woodroof in “Dallas Buyers Club.” Woodroof had Stage 4 HIV, so McConaughey had to lose considerable weight in the five months before the shooting began. Six feet tall, he weighed 182 at the time, and got down to 140 pounds on a diet of three egg whites for breakfast, 5 ounces of fish and a cup of vegetables for lunch and the same for dinner. (And as much wine as he cared to have.) And also ate a lot of ice chips.

“Greenlights” is more than an autobiography, far more than a comedy or a series of adventures. The author gives us a lively look at his life in and out of his movies and provides readers with an honest look at who he is. McConaughey wants readers to come away understanding that those yellow and red lights that annoy us and drag us down will soon to turn green.

He is married, has three children, and founded the “just keep living Foundation,” which helps at-risk high schoolers make “healthier mind, body, and spirit choices.” He is also professor of practice of the University of Texas and Minister of Culture for the University of Texas and City of Austin.

Mims Cushing lives in Ponte Vedra Beach and has written three books .

Matthew McConaughey

Follow to get new release updates, special offers (including promotional offers) and improved recommendations.

About the author

Academy Award–winning actor Matthew McConaughey is a married man, a father of three children, and a loyal son and brother. He considers himself a storyteller by occupation, believes it's okay to have a beer on the way to the temple, feels better with a day’s sweat on him, and is an aspiring orchestral conductor. In 2009, Matthew and his wife, Camila, founded the just keep livin Foundation, which helps at-risk high school students make healthier mind, body, and spirit choices. In 2019, McConaughey became a professor of practice at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as Minister of Culture/M.O.C. for the University of Texas and the City of Austin. McConaughey is also brand ambassador for Lincoln Motor Company, an owner of the Major League Soccer club Austin FC, and co-creator of his favorite bourbon on the planet, Wild Turkey Longbranch.

Most popular

Customers also bought items by

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Ryan's Reading Reviews

Book Reviews and More

Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

Updated June 12th, 202 3

Alright, Alright, Alright. Time for my review of Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey’s new book. (I won’t ruin it for you, but there is definitely a story in there about how the iconic “ McConaugheyian ” three word catchphrase came about, which may be worth the price of the book alone. (Hint: you could also just Google it. ;))

A Novel non-Novel

See what I did there? Ok, I haven’t read too many memoirs , but Greenlights is definitely unique in this regard. McConaughey shares some personal anecdotes, stories, and life lessons , so it’s part memoir, part personal development, part just entertaining storytelling.

Well, What Are these “Greenlights”?

By “Greenlights”, McConnaughey means things that set you up for success. It could be a system, habit stacking, building momentum, having small wins, etc. Here a few examples of “Greenlights”:

• Meditating in the morning
• Drinking Bulletproof Coffee (unless you have high cholesterol ).
• Laying out your gym clothes the night before, so you don’t have to spend energy in the morning.
• Basically, anything that sets you up for success/makes your life easier!

What is Becoming Relative with the Inevitable?

McConaughey also uses the catchphrase “ becoming relative with the inevitable” throughout the book. This phrase and idea really resonated with me. But what does it mean?

Becoming relative with the inevitable means, simply, shit is going to happen in life . That’s inevitable. Life is full of ups and downs, but in this case, we are focusing on the downs :(. When you are in a tough situation, you can become relative – that means you can persist through the challenge/adversity and keep doing what you are doing. You can pivot – change, and do something different. Or, you can concede- give up.

McConaughey says, what you do in these tough situations, and when , could help us in our own art of living . Though he call’s it livin’, without the “g”, throughout the book for some reason, probably just cause he’s Matthew McConaughey.

Greenlights is full of other cool/fun stories which I never knew about him- he shares some personal stuff which I will let you read about in the book, not on my blog.

Did you know he drove around the United States in an RV for years? He would fly out and pick up a producer or agent at an airport and drive them back home in his RV, all while discussing the movie scripts. All in a days work! But, how cool to have all that freedom!

How Many Stars?

4.5 stars 🙂.

A pretty interesting and fast read if you want to learn more about him and take some of his life lessons and apply them to your own life for personal growth .

Bonus points if you read this book imaging his voice like I did!

–>Buy the book here<–

May all your lights be green!

BOOK DETAILS ONE MORE TIME

Title:  Greenlights Author: Matthew McConaughey Publish Date:  October 20, 2020 ISBN: 0593139135  ISBN-13: 978-0593139134

Book  |  eBook   |  Audio

Amazon Affiliate Disclosure: Ryan’s Reading Reviews is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com

• Biggest New Books
• Non-Fiction
• All Categories
• First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
• How It Works

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

Email address:

• Categories Fiction Fantasy Graphic Novels Historical Horror Literary Literature in Translation Mystery, Crime, & Thriller Poetry Romance Speculative Story Collections Non-Fiction Art Biography Criticism Culture Essays Film & TV Graphic Nonfiction Health History Investigative Journalism Memoir Music Nature Politics Religion Science Social Sciences Sports Technology Travel True Crime

April 18, 2024

• An interview with the editors of the New York War Crimes
• The poetics of Taylor Swift’s style
• Kate Dwyer interviews Anne Carson

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Gold review – the priciest ore is a bore in Matthew McConaughey misfire

An allegedly true story emerges as a lackluster riff on American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street with a scrappy turn from an overly disguised lead star

T here’s not much that glitters in Gold, a lackluster caper that proves that even the priciest ore can bore. Stephen Gaghan’s new film is an admixture of the capitalist nihilism from The Wolf of Wall Street and the cheap-suit true crime of American Hustle. On paper the elements are there, but unfortunately the alchemy fails. This year’s earlier picture War Dogs, already something of a formulaic copy, comes off looking like quite the jewel by comparison.

Matthew McConaughey, whose brief scene in The Wolf of Wall Street is well on its way to being considered iconic, is all over the map as the DIY metal man Kenny Wells. One moment he is slick and appealing, the next he is a shambling shyster. The screenplay lurches between comedy and intrigue, attempting to sell Wells’s love of penetrating the earth for its riches as some sort of misunderstood romantic impulse, when it would be easier to just admit the man wants to be rich.

Wells, who inherits a successful business from his father in the early 1990s, is driven, in Trumpian fashion, to go for big risks. He teams with a down-on-his-luck but brilliant geologist (Edgar Ramírez) and soon the pair have got Indonesian villagers drilling in a valley because they know that’s where their future awaits, malaria be damned.

Back home in Nevada, Wells has a group of salesmen wearing loose ties who hang around the bar all day, ready to make phone calls to easily hoodwinked investors. And there’s also Bryce Dallas Howard , who must win this year’s award for Most Thankless Wife (Girlfriend?) Role of the Year. I honestly can’t remember a damn thing she does in this movie except look worried from time to time.

Well, eventually they hit the motherlode and that means a soaring stock price and interest from New York firms that want to partner in the extraction and movement of what might be the biggest gold strike in decades. McConaughey and Ramírez are very charismatic actors, so these scenes of boardroom bravado are entertaining to a degree. Wells wheels and deals to some groovy soundtrack funk – which was really a breath of fresh air when Steven Soderbergh made Out of Sight in 1998 – but there’s almost a Saturday Night Live-esque parody to these sequences. It isn’t just because McConaughey has extreme male pattern baldness and a rotund middle, but it’s the strangely uninteresting nature of the story that’s being told. We can observe from a distance, but it is extremely difficult to care.

Unlike The Big Short, another movie Gold so very much wants to be like, Gaghan’s script (co-written with Patrick Massett and John Zinman) zooms through the complex business developments that cause such consternation for our main characters. Sure, Indonesia’s Suharto government sending in armed men to “nationalize” the dig is a moment that clicks, but the other negotiation sequences do not have the same resonance.

Naturally this all leads to a third-act twist, and I wouldn’t want to be the one to spoil the movie’s most interesting nugget. It is humorous to point out, however, that this film, born from the repercussions of a great fraud, enters the marketplace as being based on a true story. Cursory research shows that there are only trace elements of what actually happened (the Bre-X case, as it is called). There are parallels to McConaughey’s and Ramírez’s characters, but it is hardly a one-to-one. Did the real Kenny Wells figure accept a golden pickaxe statue as a culmination of a life’s work and give a rapturous speech about the ecstatic qualities of metallurgy? We can only hope so, because that scene’s absurdity is pure gold.

• Matthew McConaughey
• Drama films
• Bryce Dallas Howard

Comments (…)

Most viewed.