Sometimes the guest list needs to be for one. The Renaissance Man is at home where he goes”, “Once you know it’s black, it’s not near as dark”, and “Just because the seats are empty doesn’t mean they’re not taken. Bumperstickers like “Localize to customize. I wasn’t that taken with the interstitials: bumperstickers (deliberately conflated into one word by McConaughey), scraps of “outlaw logic” and poems. When he veers away from that into amorphous life lessons territory is where things get vague and a bit tedious - his prose in these parts becomes like that of a freewheeling beat poet.

McConaughey, it turns out, is a surprisingly good writer (or had a great editor), a warm, self-deprecating and funny person and a fantastic storyteller, who’s at his best when he’s telling stories from his life. And his training regime for that same movie was amusingly bonkers. I also didn’t know he was once balding (lookit that hairline on the cover!) and that prompted his look for the movie Reign of Fire - something called Regenix really works, apparently, especially if you shave your head to start with. I liked the anecdote of McConaughey working on the set of an early movie he did called Scorpion Spring, where he didn’t learn his lines until right before shooting - unsurprisingly it didn’t work out well. McConaughey’s parents were real characters too and the stories featuring them, particularly his dad, were all brilliant - like how his dad resurrected their pet cockatiel Lucky through putting him in his mouth! My favourite was when he went to Australia for a year as part of the student exchange program and got stuck with a kooky family that lived in the middle of nowhere and drove poor Matthew crazy. The best stories here and mostly from before he was famous. That said, there’s enough entertaining stuff in Greenlights to make it a decent read.

Because, like taking nearly two pages to explain essentially positive thinking/luck, McConaughey spends an entire book rambling from genres like memoir to self help to spirituality without really committing to any, and, despite talking about himself the entire time, when you get to the end, you don’t really feel like you’ve gotten to know him at all.

Matthew McConaughey’s explanation of the term “Greenlights” is indicative of the book overall: you get a sense of what he means without really knowing for sure what it is.

Greenlights matthew mcconaughey review