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.

It makes sense that an iconoclast like Matthew McConaughey would take the basic idea of an autobiography and make it all his own. It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights-and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too. 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. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. 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. 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.”

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. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. 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. “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 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

Book greenlights