Book ~ "Greenlights" (2020) Matthew McConaughey

From Goodreads ~ 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 realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.

Good luck. 

I wouldn't say I'm a big Matthew McConaughey fan.  He seems like a nice fella and a free spirit and I was interested enough in him to read his book.

The book starts back in the beginning with his parents ... who divorced each other twice and married each other three times.  He tells of growing up as the youngest of three boys and their unstable childhood (his parents sound whacked).  He was popular in high school and spent a year in an exchange program in Australia.  He went to university with dreams of being a lawyer but switched when he realized he wanted to get into movies.  He's done a lot of travelling and seemed to go where the wind took him.

I liked the writing style and liked that it was written at a high level (so not a great deal of details).  I found the sticky notes, bumper stickers, words of wisdom, etc. a bit weird so ignored them after awhile as they didn't make a lot of sense to me.  I came away feeling the same about him as before I read the book ... he seems like a nice fella and a free spirit.  As a head's up, there is swearing, adult activity (with himself!) and drug and alcohol use.