Editor’s Note: For the next few weeks, the Lifestyle section will be showcasing their favorite podcasts, TV shows, movies, books and more to help UMass students while self-sequestering, quarantining or just to pass the time as COVID continually keeps us indoors. Welcome to Getting Through. 

You may recognize him from movies like Dallas Buyers Club, Interstellar, The Wedding Planner, or you’ve maybe even heard the famous line, “alright, alright, alright.” Matthew McConaughey, the American actor and producer, has stepped off the screen to write his own book, Greenlights. 

Greenlights, a #1 New York Times bestseller was released this past October. Greenlights’ is an autobiography of Matthew McConaughey’s life, focusing on the ups and downs and more specifically, the greenlights that led him to where he is today. It’s a combination of his diary entries, different life lessons, poems, experiences, and beliefs he’s gathered throughout his life.

The book is centered around the idea of “catching greenlights.” He uses greenlights as a sort of metaphor for moments in life that moved him forward in whatever direction he thought best in the moment. And as you learn in the book, these greenlights took him cross-country, living out of a van with his dog, across the world to African villages, and even to meeting his wife. 

Greenlights is an inspirational and surprising story that pushes you to catch more greenlights, and see redlights as a temporary pause. It’ll change your perspective of living. And as he says in the book, “every red light eventually turns green.”

Email Madison Bethune at [email protected]