Dana Vachon

Jim Carrey

"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.

Memoirs and Misinformation

Patrick Book

Shocked how good this is and how much I enjoyed it. Definitely feels like two novellas smashed together without any real connective tissue, and may be a touch over-written — there’s like 20 distinct ideas on every page. But what a roller coaster ride. It’s good to know that celebrities recognize how dumb celebrity culture is and very satisfying to see a gonzo piece of Palahniuk-inspired writing eviscerating Hollywood nonsense.

A hilarious fever dream with valuable commentary on society and culture. 

Jacob Hopkins

Sveinbjörn Pálsson

A flawed but interesting work, filled with fun ideas and characters, but marred by an often times sophomoric nihilism dressed up in west coast spiritualist drag. You’ll probably enjoy it more if you just skip the ending.

Gavin

Morbid performance art, sick in the good way, in the sense of standing outside life, unfiltered, disillusioned. You probably know that Carrey has been loudly nihilistic and hippieish and radical for many years. Chafing against his clown origins. Filled with demons, antipathy to industry, money, fame, medicine, humans. 

  		across his billion-pixel screen, the volcanic plume collapsed beneath its own mass, cascading down the sides of the digital Vesuvius. The syphilis girls, the magistrate, the young lovers and their child, all of them and their dreams, carbonized...

Dull featured and acne scarred, Nancy had been cast for the strong response she elicited in focus groups: pure pity. The producers had planted her as a moral obstacle. For the contestants, the logical move was to dispatch her quickly, without regret. But what of the debt owed the weak by the strong? What of the viewers’ delusions of morality—and the wrath that lived just beneath them?

	..."I never expected humanity was really gonna matter very much,” said Carrey. The camera panned to him. “To look for any meaning in it is a ridiculous thing. The vastness just laughs at you. How’s it go? Matter makes up three percent of the universe. The rest is dark energy or dark matter or whatever? They don’t know. They were never gonna know. Things grow and die. Fungus on a tree. Lavender in a field. What’s the meaning of lavender in a field? I’m okay with the meaninglessness. I’m okay without meaning.” 
“But we made our own meaning, didn’t we?” said Hanks. “We gave it to each other as a gift.” 
“I see what you’re saying,” said Carrey, with a shrug

I like a good nihilist, but this form is just the sincere logical endpoint of the new age environmental spiritualism that his fellows insincerely ape. Good for him for taking ideas seriously I guess. (Buddhist abnegation as a tactic for dealing with the fact that you don't like yourself very much.) But the book mocks all of that

  His first job was with Deepak Chopra, leading Quantum Encounter Workshops for corporate executives. But Natchez soon found fault with Chopra’s teachings, perhaps because there was fault to be found, perhaps because he himself needed to be the alpha guru.



Anyway this is a relentless Gonzo memoir, by which I mean tasteless fiction which falls short of surrealism by being too obviously fake. 

  "I’m here for the joy of pulling a blade through flesh,” said Gwyneth Paltrow. “Whoa, girl,” said Goldie Hawn.


The standard schtick with this is to surround a few truths with fantasies (so that you don't feel sentimental, so that you have deniability, so that people laugh even as you lay the heaviest shit of your life on them). (Norm does it better.) It's in the third person, tellingly. What feels true: the childhood poverty; the intense rankling hatred of factory work and bosses; some really vivid and unhealthy dispositions towards food, surprisingly; his affection and gratitude to Rodney Dangerfield; the analysis of comedy's social function.

  This [mock romance with a middle-aged stranger] brought the whole room to its feet, love’s caricature sowing want of its real form in the hearts of all present—even his own...

And when, fleeing his burning mansion, he turns to save one item, he turns back to slapstick over the miserable moderns: "Charlie Chaplin had battled the bleak world with—what? Not a knife, not a gun. A cane. Gentle, gestural, the baton of a maestro. Chaplin’s cane, with no disrespect to Hockney, Picasso, or Basquiat, was, in this moment, what Jim Carrey most wanted to save."


  The suggestion that Carrey was somehow insane had long been used as a tool of manipulation by his handlers. The touching of this wound enraged him now.

"You're the one casting a white guy as Mao Zedong"
"I'm casting Mao's spirit inside a white guy..."
"We live in a crumbling multiethnic Ponzi-scheme society requiring a highly policed cultural environment to avoid outright chaos. That’s the problem.” “You live in a crumbling multiethnic Ponzi-scheme society requiring whatever it was you said,” said Hopkins, refilling his Burgundy. “I—am an Englishman."
 (Actually he'd far more likely say Welshman.)

  Grilled cheese sandwiches. Chasing a puck across a frozen lake. His mother in high color. Healthy, jolly. Instigating dinner-table food fights. It was understood, when she made her special cherry cheesecake, that half was to be eaten, half to be thrown. Glistening airborne cherries and her melodic laughter...



He depicts himself as a gluttonous, childish, resentful, lustful rube, whose turn to making serious art is itself a vain bid for status.

  she’d found a rich, powerful star desperate to be loved. Desperate to believe. In Natchez Gushue. In Freudian confusion mistaken for destiny. In anything kinder than chaos. And gazing at his mother’s eyes set in Georgie’s face, Carrey marveled at the sheer benevolence of a creator who, working through local cable providers, would not only reveal but deliver her to him... 
Within six months they had arranged for permanent karmic joining with a Melanesian spirit ceremony, held at Kelsey Grammer’s home in the Malibu Hills...

		Use it!” cried Kaufman. “Eat with your hands! Feed the glutton!” So Carrey clawed his fingers, snatching up greasy braids of noodles and stuffing them into his mouth. Hopkins cheered. “They starve while you gorge! Just as it was with Mao, dancing in Shanghai as the peasants ate their children.”... 	What is Mao but the father of modern capitalism?... gnawing, chomping, feeding, sucking, guided by an inner roaring until that roaring quieted, and then he fell asleep, belly full, animal cells fed.


	...a deep-fake video that had, almost overnight, gained such virality as to merit concern. Somewhere in the Korean peninsula a tech-savvy pervert had feminized Carrey’s features... Was this a pent-up transsexual drive finally given outlet? Or merely a particularly intense expression of masturbation’s guiding narcissism. Far from wanting to sue anyone, Carrey longed only to pass through the screen...

He’d planned to give a dinner toast laced with Marxist criticisms, comments against American capitalism, vampiric imperialism, just edgy enough to scare off the Disney execs, his class enemies, the same who’d crushed his father, who’d have broken him in the Toronto factories if he hadn’t escaped. Now he decided to make the air truly unbreathable for them. He rose from his chair, bone-dry desert wind rustling...


The rest of it is just reusing the same gag: celebrities you like being violent ideologues.

  Nicolas Cage served as Jim's Spirit Witness... Stripped down to their briefs, sun low in the west, they circled each other in a black-sand dojo ringed with mastodon skeletons that Cage had won in Mongolian auctions... The sun poured raspberry through the ancient ribs, striping Cage's face in shadow and fire. Pleased with this visual effect, he made his plea... Taller and thus favored by the physics of combat, Carrey lunged at [Nic] Cage, who fought dirty, gouging Carrey’s eyes, saying if blindness was what he sought it was easily achieved. Carrey peeled Cage’s hands off his eyes; Cage peeled Carrey’s hands from his own hands... "We battle ancient mojo in my black-sand shadow dojo" said Cage...


The world ends, a Truman Show terminated by its alien showrunners. The aliens are critics, paparazzi, media executives: "Fuck the critics! Fuck the tabloids! Fuck you bastards for hounding me across space and time."

In real life and here, Carrey is able to see the dark world and not make excuses for it, not deny it, and not lie about it to make people comfortable and so profit from them. This is a remarkable achievement for anyone, let alone a celebrity. But he is not able to go to the stage after that, acting against it. (To be fair, I laughed every time he redid Gwyneth Paltrow as sadistic blood geek, "Nic’s last claim, to past lives, is not scientifically verifiable,” said Gwyneth Paltrow. “But the rest checks out"... "	Make those alien cunts confetti,” said Gwyneth Paltrow, clapping her hands. The battle paint was changing her. “Dance to the music of their agony.")

Dana Vachon, the [co]writer seems to have just edited together the rants: "They Skyped constantly, Carrey spewing ideas, Vachon struggling to turn them into cohesive prose. That process continued regularly for nearly a decade, ending only in February with a final draft."


  Carrey smiled to think he’d ever thought he was a person at all. What a ludicrous delusion. What colossal labor. How exhausting, to be a self. To keep the Ponzi fed, with words, with feats, with playing at exceptionalism.

Jasmine

I don’t really know what I just read, but I do know that I kind of loved it.

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.

A novel

Megan Charles

Honestly I thought this would be completely different than what it was. It jumped around so much that I was confused as to what I was reading most of the time. Very random and didn't have a clear story in my opinion.

Charlie de Zeeuw

DNF: 74% done and then decided I wanted to maintain at least one braincell fully intact.

Lets get into this. 
I am a massive fan of Jim. His comedy films are obviously classics and the documentary about his portrayal of Andy Kaufman has permanently changed my life and viewpoint toward the world. Therefore I willingly spent the €25 on the hardcover edition of this book. Skipping reading reviews or wondering why I couldn find so little copies of this celebrities’ writing. I understood about 40 pages in. 

- I’m not on drugs. I have never been near drugs. I would never do drugs. But now I sincerely doubt whether someone drugged me before turning these pages. I have no clue what I’ve read besides critique on Hollywood and celebrity through the eyes on a very spiritual and mentally disturbed man. 

- This literally has not plot. Sure it’s about Jim and his struggles to accept he won’t forever be famous and constantly adored, but where did the aliens and the Marilyn Monroe murder come from? Why were there so many random celebrities helping him become an ancient and deceased Japanese warlord? How is this a book that got published? 

- I would read a spiritual guidance/orientation book written by Jim if he could only write a chapter without going PAINFULLY off track. 

- I’m pained to put this down but it’s no longer worth my time. There are too many better things to read. Sorry Carrey. I adore you but this was trash of the finest kind.

Memoirs and Misinformation

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