Almost done with the audiobook version of Matthew McConaughey’s “Greenlights” (about 30 minutes left) I love a good celebrity/notable person memoir and wanted to love this book, but it fell short for me in many ways. People like to think of him as humble, but he came across as anything but to me. I love him as an actor, but his life story is boastful, narcissistic, and full of needless rambling. He praises the relationship of his parents as if it’s some kind of marital model, but his father was abusive to his wife and children, and his mother was abusive in a many ways as well. There is an anecdote of him writing a poem and his mother basically telling him to take the words of someone else and putting his name on it as if he wrote it. He did, got a good grade, and felt ok with his mother’s advice of plagiarism because it ended up being a “green light” for him. They were toxic.

Matthew has a voice and personality fit for story telling, and a lot of the tidbits of his life sound like just that...made up stories. It was all too self help/Tony Robbins to me. Annoyingly loud “note to self” interjections got old and descriptions of multiple wet dreams were gross and unnecessary. McConaughey and anyone else is free to tell their life story in whatever way they want...and he did, but he wanted to come off as relatable and humble and he sorely missed the mark.