Greenlights seems a natural title for a book by a man who’s spent much of his life on the road.

(He no longer has prophetic wet dreams, but the mountain lion, he says, ended up in his lap, purring while he scratched it under the chin. He claims, at various points, to have done peyote in a cage with a mountain lion, watched his father resurrect a drowned bird with mouth-to-mouth, and built a 13-story treehouse out of stolen wood. There, he took on a local giant in a wrestling match as the rest of the village cheered them on. When the same wet dream came years later, he spied “African tribesmen” on the banks, and followed the vision to Mali. He followed the dream to Peru and floated naked down the Amazon, where he caught the “wave of a mermaid’s tale” as she headed downriver. The first was in ’96, when he had a vivid, ejaculatory nightmare in which he was floating down the Amazon River, his body wrapped in various dangerous reptiles. In fact, that’s a good way to describe Greenlights, a book that will be sold as a celebrity memoir, but whose tales are so tall it reads more like a book of folk tales for grown-ups.Ĭonsider the hero’s wet-dream adventures. Reading it, you come across many of these anecdotes, which smell just slightly of bullshit but not enough to distract from the charm of the storyteller behind them. The story, which he’s never shared until now, is literally a footnote in Greenlights, his memoir, out this week. So when the interviewer congratulated him for his recent work on Killer Joe and Magic Mike, he said: “Thank you, yeah, I’m on a great ride, I actually did an interview the other day and the journalist called it a ‘McConaissance.’” Brilliant - the McConaissance! The reporter gushed, “That may stick.”

But he needed a “campaign slogan, an anthem, a bumper sticker” to brand the pivot, and he knew it couldn’t come from him. It was a deliberate part of his rebrand from “rom-com McConaughey” - the leading man in films like The Wedding Planner and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, which brought him fame and fortune in the aughts - to a serious dramatic actor. Photo: Brendon Thorne/Getty Images for Wild Turkeyĭid you know that Matthew McConaughey made up the McConaissance? Indeed, he “coined, and created” the term, and fed it to an MTV reporter at a 2013 Sundance interview for Mud.

Book greenlights