Memoirs and Misinformation: A novel by Jim Carrey & Dana Vachon
“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.
Robin Gregory –
In an interview with New York Times reviewer, Dave Itzkoff, Jim Carrey explains his latest book, Memoirs and Misinformation, co-written by Dana Vachon. “It’s the end of the world, and we have the perfect book for it.” He continues, “Not the end of civilization. Just the end of a world, the selfish world. We’re getting over the Ayn Rand, ‘you can be a jerk and we can all live in a paradise of jerks’ thing. That’s what we’re going through.”
Part autobiography, part fiction, Carrey and Vachon draw disparate parts of experience together to pull off an unconventional memoir/farewell letter to civilization as they know it.
It opens with the broken, bed bound, paranoid, messy version of Jim Carrey. Apocalyptic and soulless, Los Angeles serves as a backdrop for his mental state. Visceral ruminations follow, treating Hollywood as a trope for civilization teetering on the brink of extinction.
This Jim Carrey trusts no one. Reality is fickle. Celebrities are phonies. Even time is a “trick.”
Allrighty then.
If it weren’t for brilliant flashes of irony and humor, and the taut, lyrical prose, I might not have been able to take this grim version of Hollywood. Jim Carrey, Drama King, is an apocalyptic persona within an apocalypse. He exposes the cultural underbelly of acting, agents, celebrity, and privilege, while yearning for friendship, romance, anything meaningful.
No one is safe passing under his purview. Least of all himself. While watching a television show explaining how Cro-Magnon annihilated the Neanderthals, he falls apart, drawing parallels to his fear of “total erasure.” He asks, is the “value of an existence as part of a species forever looping between horror and heartache…?” Lonely, restless, narcissistic, he looks to his guard dogs and a computerized security system, that speaks “in the voice of a Singaporean opium heiress who summered in Provence,” for affection.
He’s in mourning for the world, and for his lost “self.” Terrified of life, terrified of death. The thought of John Lennon’s final portrait taken in the morgue, sends him into a self-grooming frenzy, just in case he dies and fanboys at the morgue sell his photo to the highest bidder.
Flashback to the beginning of the end.
This Jim Carrey is on top of his game. In a darkly comedic scenario, he’s at a banquet celebrating a whopping box office success. Surrounded by grifting dignitaries (investors), he charms them with an absurd guzzle straight from a bottle of expensive wine. Further laying the groundwork for a sleazy, black comedy, Carrey and Vachon go on to describe his early (fictionalized) career, poking fun at Nicolas Cage, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Cruise, and the celebrity addiction to cosmetic surgery.
In a world where even reality TV is fake, Carrey continually asks himself, What is real?
He affirms in interviews that some passages were taken from real life experiences. As a sincere seven-year-old, he definitely was desperate to bring a smile to his ill mother’s face. He truly does carry a torch for the singer, Linda Ronstadt, who he dated in his twenties. He is still mourning the loss of his friend Rodney Dangerfield.
And yet, he is quoted in a press release, saying that “none of it is real, and all of it is true.”
In the end, Carrey and other stars are battling an alien invasion, a slapstick finale that pokes fun at the book itself, as it correlates his misfortunes with Armageddon.
Ultimately, Memoirs and Misinformation is a feverish, visionary dream. Reminiscent of misanthropic, Dostoevskian character who introduces himself with “I am a sick man,” it amalgamates fiction and non-fiction. Both expose illusions upon which society is formed, and the resultant effect on individual lives. And both are narrated by terribly clever, unreliable characters who emblazon the egotistical self, struggling to maintain control over life rather than be transformed.
ROBIN GREGORY is an American screenwriter and author who studied Creative Writing and Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Stanford Writers Workshop. Her début novel, The Improbable Wonders of Moojie Littleman, won a number of awards, including Kirkus Review’s Best Indie Books of the Year. She lives in California with her husband and son. A member of the Visionary Fiction Alliance, her passion is to inspire transformation through esoteric wisdom and magical realism.