She’s now quarantined with him and his family in Austin during the pandemic and they’ve long patched up their wounds, but after his initial taste of stardom, the actor writes that his mother seemed to be “a woman more enamored with fame than was.” McConaughey also admits that fame made his relationship with his mother more difficult later in his life. Divorced twice and remarried to each other three times, the actor’s parents are introduced in an early scene getting into a bloody scrap over dinner that ultimately ended with them dropping to their knees and having sex on the kitchen floor.
( The Cut asked McConaughey about this never-before-discussed abuse in a recent interview, and he insisted that the experiences didn’t affect him long term, nor did he “need or pursue” help afterward.) He also dives into the complex but loving relationship that his parents, Jim and Kay McConaughey, shared with each other. Even before the first chapter of the book begins, the actor confides that he was blackmailed into sex at fifteen and “molested by a man at eighteen,” though he says that he’s never felt like a victim. For starters, the memoir gets unexpectedly dark at several points. Greenlights doesn’t necessarily set out to destroy the mythology of McConaughey or his “McConaissance,” but it does challenge these preconceptions. It’s a wild ride to be sure, but if you enjoy McConaughey and all of the eccentricities and contradictions that come with him, it’s one you won’t want to miss. But reading Greenlights was a delightful surprise, full of stories that hadn’t been shared on late night talk shows or made headlines over the years. His career and his presence have been inescapable for most of my life, so if you’d asked me prior to reading the book if I knew pretty much all there was to know about the actor, I’d have said yes. I was born and raised in Texas, same as McConaughey, and I went to the University of Texas at Austin, cheering on the Longhorns, too. “The closer to the root the hotter it gets.” “Truth’s like a jalapeño,” he writes at one point. It’s part biography, part playbook-a recollection of crucial moments in the actor’s life punctuated by life lessons and colorful aphorisms that can only be found in the South. Written over the course of a 52-day self-imposed exile in the West Texas desert with 36 years’ worth of journals, the book is a collage of memories, photographs, poems, notes to self, and bumper stickers that make up the past 50 years of his life.
“This isn’t your traditional memoir,” he writes. In fact, he’s so serious about this, it’s the very first line in his book. Matthew McConaughey wants you to know that Greenlights isn’t your typical celebrity autobiography.
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