Audiobook Review: Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

Greenlights
Author: Matthew McConaughey

Narrator: Matthew McConaughey
Published: October 20, 2020
Audiobook: 6 hours 42 minutes

Reviewed By: Jessica
Dates Listened To:  June 21-23, 2023
Jessica’s Rating: 5 stars

Audiobook Description:

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.

Jessica’s Review:

This is a memoir to enjoy! Greenlight!

I have always been a Matthew McConaughey fan and have been meaning to read this one forever! And I went with the audiobook and it gets a perfect 5 stars from me! Greenlight!

McConaughey tells us his life story up to his first 50 years of life, and for the audiobook he tells it himself.  And it wasn’t just him reading the book he wrote, listening to it  was an experience! He tells his story with such expression and puts everything into his narration, I don’t think I could have possibly enjoyed this memoir any more than I did! Greenlight!

McConaughey seems totally down to earth and tells his story where you feel that you get to know him as a person. Everything before, during, and after Hollywood! And things you think you know (aka the bongo drum incident) we actually learn even more about. 

Did you know that McConaughey was an exchange student to Australia?  I didn’t and he definitely had an interesting experience! He tells us about his childhood and he also traveled through Europe on a motorcycle with a few other actors, and he even floated down the Amazon.

McConaughey seems like a down to earth man and did you know all he ever wanted in life was to be a father?  We even get a part of the man’s spirituality.

We get his career in Hollywood, and I forgot he was in Angels in the Outfield!  We get his start with Dazed and Confused I was most interested in his time working on A Time to Kill, and why he doesn’t do rom coms anymore. I learned about a few of his films I did not know about but now want to see: Mud and Dallas Buyers Club. We see him meet his future wife and mother of his three children. Greenlight!

If you are a Matthew McConaughey fan you must read this book! I would say listen to it to hear the literal words come out of his mouth himself.  This is the kind of memoir I love, one where you feel that you really get to know the person.  The last memoir I listened to and felt that way was Jessica Simpson’s memoir Open Book.  If you are looking for any dirt and gossip you will be disappointed. He didn’t kiss and tell on relationships other than his wife.  Listening to this memoir I really feel like I got to know the man, yet he also kept some things private.   Greenlight!

Purchase Links:
Amazon US
Amazon UK