Greenlights

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 6 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE! Now in paperback and with exclusive new content, the life-changing memoir that has inspired millions of readers through the Academy Award–winning actor’s unflinching honesty, unconventional wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction.

“The No. 1 celebrity memoir of the past 10 years.”—USA Today

“McConaughey’s book invites us to grapple with the lessons of his life as he did—and to see that the point was never to win, but to understand.”—Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

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.

About the Author

Academy Award–winning actor and #1 New York Times bestselling author Matthew McConaughey a married man, a father of three children, and a loyal son and brother. He considers himself a storyteller by occupation, believes it’s okay to have a beer on the way to the temple, feels better with a day’s sweat on him, and is an aspiring orchestral conductor. He is co-owner of The Austin FC Soccer Club and a professor at the University of Texas in Austin. Matthew and his wife, Camila, founded the just keep livin Foundation, which is dedicated to helping boys and girls transform into men and women through programs that teach the importance of decision-making, health, education, and active living. Following the tragedy in McConaughey’s hometown of Uvalde, the couple created the Greenlights Grants Initiative, which helps school districts nationwide access billions of dollars in available federal funding to create safer school environments for our children. In October 2023, Matthew and Camila launched their own tequila brand, Pantalones, the first joint venture for the couple. McConaughey currently resides in Austin, Texas.