I Read McConaughey’s Greenlights So You Don’t Have To

Disclaimer: I haven’t actually read the entire thing. Doing so would have erased the tiny shred of self-respect I had left when I wearily set it down after two painful hours.

Like all celebrity memoirs, Greenlights is filled with all of the tired self-help clichés and motivational platitudes you’d expect from someone who, for a living, is paid to recite words that other people write. In his defense, McConaughey did have the brilliant literary imagination to triple up the word ‘alright’ and make it sound, you know, completely retarded. Apparently, his signature alright-alright-alright Texas cool that he uses to sell luxury sedans to horny middle-aged soccer moms doesn’t translate as well on the page. The guy, as you’ll see shortly, is a complete dumbshit.

I know, I know, it’s tempting to buy it. After all, it’s got tons of bogus hype around it and–you might want to sit down for this one–it currently sits at No. 1 on the NY Times bestseller list. Further down on the list? Oh, just two Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and President Obama. But in case our besotted culture hasn’t slid far enough into a gutter that puts McConaughey’s quote-unquote book at No. 1, you might be pleased to know that Greenlights is also recommended by the likes of literary stalwart Kim Kardashian and professor of letters Kanye West. To save you the trouble and time, I recently spent wasted two hours working my way through most of McConaughey’s drug-addled recollections of pivotal moments in his life and the mental notes he made of them, presumably anticipating the day he could cash in on his celebrity and pawn a shitty book off as accumulated wisdom. Well that day has finally come!

(Promise me you won’t sully your coffee table with this gleaming turd bowl. I’ve saved you the trouble. You’re welcome.)

The Cover

There he is. Matthew-fucken-McConaughey. The man himself, looking every bit the smug, self-satisfied douchenozzle we’ve all come to know and despise. Well, except for my wife (and likely yours, too). My profound hatred of the man is only matched by her unbridled passion for him. Whatever.

So…where to even begin? For starters, the cover looks like a shot of McConaughey dropping a deuce with a power fan aimed right at his hair plugs. His contemplative gaze and prayer hands neatly tucked under his chin create an “I’m-taking-a-shit-here-but also-pondering-14th century-Chaucer-as-I-pinch-out-a-loaf effect. As if that weren’t ridiculous enough, the illustrator opted to tint the cover–and McConaughey himself–in monochromatic bronze–monochromatic bronze!–giving it a Roman sculptural kinkiness that, well, I don’t know, is just plain weird. And oddly arousing. But mostly just weird. I have never seen a picture of a dude who has worked so hard to give off the impression that he doesn’t take himself seriously look more like a person who takes himself way too seriously. But that’s McConaughey. Laid back and cool. But serious as death when it comes to the indecipherable horseshit he passes off as philosophical wisdom. Speaking of which…

The Pearls

Determined to establish his originality and not appear derivative in a genre known for it, McConaughey avoids well-worn wisdom clichés like “work hard”, “be disciplined” and “don’t buy expensive shit”, and instead opts for confusing McConaugheyisms that are essentially a jumbled collection of words that make absolutely zero sense.

Case in point: “To lose the power of confrontation is to lose the power of unity.” To lose…the power. Ok, wait, to lose the power…of confrontation–to lose the power of confrontation–ok, got it–is…to lose–ok, hold on–to lose the power of unity, I mean concentration, to lose the power of concentration, is to lose the, ah fuck it.

That’s the whole book. No joke. That’s it. Various piles of unintelligible dogshit that a ghostwriter somehow decrypted and then managed to write a coherent paragraph on McConaughey’s behalf. Included in the paragraph are such indispensable takeaways as “work hard” and “don’t buy expensive shit”.

How about one more: “Truth’s like a jalapeño. The closer to the root, the hotter it gets.” This one, evidently, is supposed to teach you that if you’re not making $20 million for two months “work” on a movie set, well, you’re eating the wrong jalapeno, pardner.

The Title

Maybe a more fitting title would have been Alwrong, Alwrong, Alwrong: My Life as a Hollywood Douche. To his credit, McConaughey maintains that the selection of his title, Greenlights, involved more than just blatant pandering to self-help junkies eager for yet another book on how to make life seem effortless and wonderful and full of greenlights. No sir. Not this book. Its title has a story behind it, dammit, and, like all of the exaggerated yarns that McConaughey masterfully spins, this one is chock-full of zany metaphors and other impossible-to-understand, made-up crap. As it happens, the story also serves as the opening (one you’ll soon regret walking through) to the book itself.

It goes something like this: After a bitter fight in the kitchen, one that escalated with ketchup being squirted and knives being drawn, McConaughey’s parents, both dripping with said ketchup, spontaneously drop onto the kitchen linoleum in front of poor Matthew, four at the time, and start boneing. Ever the practical philosopher, McConaughey later *uses* this horrific childhood scene and redeems it into the title of his crappy book. I’ll let him explain: “They dropped to their knees, then to the bloody, ketchup-covered linoleum kitchen floor … and made love. A red light turned green.”

And there you have it. Greenlights.

In stores now.