Matthew McConaughey can now add children’s book author to his impressive résumé. The actor, whose 2020 memoir Greenlights was a number one New York Times bestseller, says that the idea for Just Because (out now) came to him at 2 o’clock in the morning.
“It was a diddy, a song that I woke up with in my head—I got up and just started writing it down,” he says. “Just because they threw the dart doesn’t mean that it stuck. And just because I’ve got some skills don’t mean there is no luck—I just started writing all these couplets. It was stuff that my own children had been talking to me and their mother about—things that they’re confused about, frustrated about trying to figure out.”
McConaughey says he hopes the book will help facilitate meaningful chats between parents and their kids. “It’s a way to have digestible, easy conversations with our kids that may otherwise be hard to have,” he says. As McConaughey releases a book he hopes will make a difference, we asked him to reflect on some of the books that have had the biggest impact on him. Here’s what he said.
The Greatest Salesman in the World
“Sometimes we seek books—and sometimes they just find us. This book found me when I was at the University of Texas, at a time when I was really struggling with what my career path was going to be. I was a liberal arts and psychology major. I was going to become a lawyer. I had been kind of not sleeping well with the idea of being a lawyer, and I was like, I think I want to go into the storytelling business. But the idea of being behind or in front of the camera was just foreign to me. I was at a friend’s house, and this book was under a stack of Sports Illustrateds and Playboys. I picked it up and read the prologue. I went to my friend who was sleeping in his bedroom—he had been up all night cramming for an exam—and I said, “Hey, can I borrow this book?” And he, kind of groggy, woke up, and he looked at it and he goes, “No, you can have it.” He goes, “My dad gave that to me, and he told me to hand it off to someone who needed it later in life. That’s yours.” That book helped me form an identity. It gave me confidence and courage to make the choice. It was only two weeks later that I called my father and said, “I don't want to go to law school. I want to go to film school.”
Self-Reliance and Other Essays
“Emerson’s essays, Self-Reliance and The Over-Soul in particular, also made a major impact on my life and my confidence. They were such a lightning bolt in my life that I could read two lines and I’d have to shut the book and go, Whoa, I got to take a walk for a few days and try to put this philosophy out there and see what kind of reverb I get back from the world. Self-Reliance is like 17 pages, and it took me two months to read it.”
Holy Bible, King James Version
“The Bible has been very important to me. I’m the last one to forgive myself. Check out Ecclesiastes if you have this affliction. Ecclesiastes taught me empathy and forgiveness. The times when I think maybe everything I’m doing needs to be so important, it reminds me, hey, there’s a season for everything, and you need the ebb and the flow. You need the dark and the light. You’ll fail, and you’ll succeed. And that’s the rhythm. There’s time for everything. So it really lets the air out of the pressure that I’ll put on myself.”
Bethany Heitman has spent 15 years producing content for women; she is the former editor-in-chief of PeopleStyle and has held senior leadership positions at Cosmopolitan and Seventeen. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York
