Books like Greenlights

01

Born to Run

Bruce Springsteen · Memoir

Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run is among the most substantive rock memoirs written, in part because Springsteen is a better prose writer than his public image suggests and in part because he chose to write about the things that actually shaped him rather than the things that made him famous.

Springsteen writes his American life with the same poetry, hard fathers, and hunger McConaughey does, a rock memoir reaching for meaning rather than gossip.

02

Open: An Autobiography

Andre Agassi · Memoir

Andre Agassi's autobiography opens with one of the most famous confessions in sports memoir: he hates tennis.

The gold standard of the brutally honest celebrity memoir, Agassi confessing he hated the thing he was best at, told with a novelist's craft.

03

Can't Hurt Me

David Goggins · Memoir

Can't Hurt Me is David Goggins's memoir of escaping an abusive childhood, failing military entrance requirements, becoming a Navy SEAL, and then becoming one of the most accomplished endurance athletes in the world — not through talent or privilege but through a deliberate, painful process of forcing himself past every limit he had.

Goggins turns a brutal life into a doctrine of self-accountability, the same insistence that your circumstances are choices, only far harder-edged.

04

Becoming

Michelle Obama · Memoir

Becoming is Michelle Obama's account of how a girl from a modest house on Chicago's South Side became one of the most recognized people in the world — and what that journey cost and revealed.

Michelle Obama shares Greenlights' warmth and hard-won self-knowledge, tracing how a specific upbringing becomes a whole way of moving through the world.

05

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

Trevor Noah · Memoir

Born a Crime is Trevor Noah's memoir about growing up mixed-race in South Africa during the final years of apartheid and its chaotic aftermath.

Trevor Noah mines a wild, dangerous childhood for humor and wisdom, that same trick of turning strange family history into perspective you earned.

06

Barbarian Days

William Finnegan · Memoir

Barbarian Days is William Finnegan's memoir of a life spent surfing — from his childhood in Los Angeles and Hawaii through decades of obsessive searching for waves across the Pacific, Asia, Africa, and eventually the cold waters of New York.

A surfing life told as literature, physical and wandering and obsessed with place, for the part of McConaughey that lives through the body and the road.

07

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

Phil Knight · Memoir

Shoe Dog is Phil Knight's account of the first two decades of Nike, from the $50 loan he borrowed from his father in 1964 to fund his first shipment of Japanese running shoes to the company's IPO in 1980.

Phil Knight built Nike on gut and stubbornness, the follow-your-instinct-against-consensus story Greenlights keeps telling about itself.

08

Educated: A Memoir

Tara Westover · Memoir

Educated is Tara Westover's memoir about growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and eventually earning a PhD in history from Cambridge University.

Tara Westover invents a self against her family's grain, the reinvention Greenlights celebrates pushed to a far more extreme and dangerous edge.

09

The Glass Castle: A Memoir

Jeannette Walls · Memoir

The Glass Castle is Jeannette Walls's memoir about growing up as the second of four children in a family that moved constantly across the American Southwest and West Virginia, rarely had enough to eat, and existed almost entirely outside conventional institutions.

Jeannette Walls renders a chaotic, unconventional family with clear-eyed love rather than blame, exactly how McConaughey treats his own strange upbringing.

10

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Anthony Bourdain · Memoir

Kitchen Confidential began as an essay in The New Yorker in 1999.

Bourdain's raw, funny, adrenaline-soaked kitchen memoir shares Greenlights' masculine candor and appetite for living at full volume.

11

The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

Ernesto Che Guevara · Memoir

In January 1952, twenty-three-year-old Ernesto Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado set off from Buenos Aires on a 500cc Norton motorcycle they called La Poderosa — The Mighty One — planning to traverse South America.

A young man's road journal of finding himself in motion, kin to McConaughey's travel chapters and the diaries this whole book grew out of.

12

Born Standing Up

Steve Martin · Memoir

Born Standing Up is Steve Martin's account of the decade-long grind that preceded his sudden, seemingly overnight fame as America's biggest stand-up comedian of the late 1970s.

Steve Martin walks away from stand-up at his commercial peak, the same trust-your-gut-and-leave move that defines McConaughey's exit from rom-coms.