Greenlights

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.

Book club questions for Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

What makes Matthew Mcconaughey such a great storyteller? Do you think he's lived an exceptional life or do you think he has kept exceptional record of his life?

What makes this an exceptional and fun audiobook?

What did you think about his parents unique relationship and story?

Did you connect and/or like one vignette over another? Did this memoir give you a new perspective on Matthew Mcconaughey as an actor, father, husband and writer?

What did you think about the story on the infamous "alright alright alright" line in Dazed and Confused? Does it make you think about other famous movie lines and how they came to be?

Greenlights Book Club Questions PDF

Click here for a printable PDF of the Greenlights discussion questions

“It shouldn't surprise you that this book is good, but it will surprise you just how good it is. Wise and entertaining, this is an inspiring memoir and how-to from one of the great outlaw philosophers and artists of our time.”

–Ryan Holiday, author of The Daily Stoic

“Unflinchingly honest and remarkably candid, Matthew 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

“Matthew McConaughey is a talented actor, a fine writer, but a total genius at living. He attacks life with an exhilarating ferocity. This is a wildly unexpected and delightful book you can’t just read, you have to experience.”

–Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October

These discussion questions were written and contributed by Nancy Brown.