Memoirs and Misinformation

Produktdetails

Verlag

Random House LLC US

Erschienen

2023

Sprache

English

Seiten

255

Infos

255 Seiten
242 mm x 152 mm

ISBN

978-0-525-65597-8

Besprechung

"A satirical adventure in which Carrey plumbs the chasms of Hollywood's self-obsessed culture." 
Dave Itzkoff, The New York Times

A simultaneously baffling and mesmerizing examination of Carrey s psyche . . .  a reimagining of the traditional Hollywood tell-all.  
Thomas Floyd, The Washington Post

Memoirs and Misinformation is, like the twisted political drawings Carrey posts on Twitter, entirely its own thing. A satire of Hollywood s self-absorption coinciding with the end of the planet, none of it is real ... except when it is . . . A wholly strange work of autofiction, laden with symbolism and metaphor, sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic.  
Glenn Whipp, Los Angeles Times

"An engaging, fun tale that plays with the public perceptions of celebrities, questions our compulsive need to view, and contains a gloriously off-the-wall conclusion." 
Alexander Moran, Booklist

"Not a typical tell-all. . . . blends moving autobiography, name-droppish tabloid fodder, science-fiction, and anti-capitalist screed."
Entertainment Weekly

A mad fever dream. . . Carrey and his collaborator Vachon pull out all the stops as their protagonist Jim Carrey careens from midlife blues through love and career complications toward the apocalypse . . . gems of comic fantasy and the nuggets of memoir gold.  
Kirkus

Textauszug

Prologue
 
They knew him as Jim Carrey.
 
And by the middle of that December his lawn had burned to a dull, amber brittle. And at night, after the sprinklers ten minutes of city-rationed watering, the grass blades floated in pooled water limp and wasted like his mother s hair in the final morphine sweats.
 
The city of Los Angeles had been moving hellward since April, with bone- dry reservoirs and strings of scorching days, the forecasts reading like a sadist s charm bracelet, 97- 98- 105- 103. Last week an F-16 had flashed like a switch-blade through the ash- filled sky just as one of the gardeners on the Hummingbird Road estate collapsed of sunstroke and fell into seizures. The man fought as they carried him to the house, saying the Virgin Mary had promised him a slow dance for three dollars in the cool shade of the ravine. At night came the Santa Anas, those devil winds that sapped the soul, that set police sirens wailing as the sunsets burned through napalm oranges into sooty mauves. Then each morning a smoggy breath would draw across the canyons and into the great house, passing through air filters recently equipped with sensors to detect assassination by nerve gas.
 
He was bearded and bleary eyed after months of break-down and catastrophe. He lay naked in his bed, so far from peak form that if you watched through a hacked security camera at this moment you might barely recognize him, might at first confuse him with a Lebanese hostage. Then, in a swell of facial recognition, you d realize: This is no ordinary shut-in watching television alone on a gigantic bed, and as the bloodred Netflix logo glared from an unseen TV you d say, I know this man, I ve seen him on everything from billboards to breakfast cereals. He s the movie star: Jim Carrey.
 
Just weeks ago, thirty seconds of home security footage was leaked to The Hollywood Reporter by some traitor in his extended personal-protection apparatus. In it Carrey bobbed facedown and fetal in his pool, wailing underwater like a captive orca. His publicist, Sissy Bosch, told Variety that he was preparing to play John the Baptist for Terrence Malick, who conveniently declined comment. The video sold for fifty thousand dollars, a sum just large enough to inspire that most sacred of animal behaviors a spontaneous market response. After the fifth paparazzo scaled his backyard fence, his security team had it raised to fifteen feet, electrified, and fringed with razor wire, an eighty-five-thousand-dollar job including the city council bribe. Jim had since begun to hear the sizzles and squeaks of electrocuted wildlife as a sorrowful necessity, animal sacrifice to his godhead. And while some believed Sissy Bosch s John the Baptist story, most noted that it didn t explain Carrey s weight gain, or why some heard a distinctly Chinese accent in his moanings.
 
It was now 2:58 in the morning.
 
He d been watching television for seven hours.
 
The binge had started with an episode of Ancient Predatorsfeaturing Megalodon, the super-shark terror of the ancient seas. Then came Cro-Magnon vs. Neanderthal, the story of how these early humans parted as cousins on the African plains, then re-met as strangers in Europe, only to begin a contest of genocide. Cro-Magnon had slaughtered without mercy, leaving famished Neanderthal orphans staring out from French caves into a blizzard, whose screaming whiteness, Jim knew, was that of total erasure. He was half French Canadian and learned from the narrator that he carried Neanderthal DNA within him; he was descended from these orphans. Feeling their doom as his own, he d begun crying tears of desolation and then, unable to bear these, he d hit pause with his grease-slicked thumb, freezing the screen on the tiny Neanderthal faces. For ten minutes he lay trembling,

Langtext

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER  "None of this is real and all of it is true." Jim Carrey

Meet Jim Carrey. Sure, he's an insanely successful and beloved movie star drowning in wealth and privilege but he's also lonely. Maybe past his prime. Maybe even ... getting fat? He's tried diets, gurus, and cuddling with his military-grade Israeli guard dogs, but nothing seems to lift the cloud of emptiness and ennui. Even the sage advice of his best friend, actor and dinosaur skull collector Nicolas Cage, isn't enough to pull Carrey out of his slump.

But then Jim meets Georgie: ruthless ingénue, love of his life. And with the help of auteur screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, he has a role to play in a boundary-pushing new picture that may help him uncover a whole new side to himself finally, his Oscar vehicle! Things are looking up!

But the universe has other plans.

Memoirs and Misinformation is a fearless semi-autobiographical novel, a deconstruction of persona. In it, Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon have fashioned a story about acting, Hollywood, agents, celebrity, privilege, friendship, romance, addiction to relevance, fear of personal erasure, our "one big soul," Canada, and a cataclysmic ending of the world apocalypses within and without.

Über den AutorIn

JIM CARREY is an award-winning actor and artist. 

DANA VACHON is the author of the novel Mergers and Acquisitions. His essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, and Vanity Fair. He lives in Brooklyn.