A sincere but uneven work for those weathering a crisis.
In this memoir/self-help book, a songwriter seeks to console and inspire readers.
In 1990, Friedman wrote a song called “Help Is on the Way,” performed by Nancy LaMott, about remaining hopeful even in times of difficulty. It would eventually become one of the anthems of the AIDS crisis. With this book, the author hopes to replicate that feat, offering a mix of stories, affirmations, and inspirational quotes to buoy those in need of a lift. Some of the wide-ranging tales come from Friedman’s personal life: his family history, his childhood, and his long career on Broadway and as a fixture of New York City’s cabaret scene. There was the time his father borrowed money from relatives to buy his own paint factory. “Talk about Help Is on the Way,” the author jokes, “almost everyone he asked contributed. Even his mother-in-law, who was living on a small, fixed income, reached into her ‘secret stash’ and gave him $10,000.” Or the time Friedman realized his attempts to force his singing voice to be a certain way was keeping him from discovering his voice’s natural tendencies. Only in being himself was he finally able to effectively sing. The author’s prose is conversational and unhurried, and his stories have an appealing, homilylike didacticism to them (attributable, perhaps, to his partner’s career as a nondenominational minister). Here, Friedman provides an explanation of humility: “What this means is that when you have a problem, you hand it over to someone or something that knows better than you how to resolve it. For example, when I have a broken toilet, I humbly call the plumber, because I know that the plumber knows how to fix it.” While many of the tales and quotes are pleasantly uplifting, the volume leans so hard into the eponymous song that it starts to become a distraction. The author mentions it frequently; the full lyrics appear twice in the work; and each chapter takes its title from a line in the song. Friedman also includes lyrics from some of his other songs in several of the chapter-ending quotation sections. There’s a recycled quality to all of this that suggests a lack of original thought. Encouraging anecdotes aside, it’s difficult to imagine the book finding a wide audience.
A sincere but uneven work for those weathering a crisis.Pub Date: May 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1736241820
Page Count: 237
Publisher: Library Tales Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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