Audiobook Review: Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey
Narrator: Matthew McConaughey
Publisher: Random House Audio
Release Date: October 20, 2020
My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
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.
Oh dear…This book was not what I expected but it was what I SHOULD have expected. There are a few tidbits from Matthew’s childhood and early adulthood. He writes even less about things that have happened to him since he became famous. Most of it is corny and/or trite “wisdom” that sounds profound until you stop and think about it for half a second. Some examples:
“We cannot fully appreciate the light without the shadows. We have to be thrown off balance to find our footing. It’s better to jump than fall.”
Or
“We catch more greenlights by simply identifying where the red lights are in our life, and then change course to hit fewer of them.”
Basically, this book is one of Matthew’s Lincoln car commercials in book form. If you think that his voice is so sexy that you’d listen to him read the phonebook [I don’t – he’s never been my type.], then this is a great audiobook for you. Otherwise, you can skip it.
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