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Dana Vachon

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Memoirs and Misinformation: A novel Kindle Edition

by Jim Carrey (Author), Dana Vachon (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 3,910 ratings

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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.

Length

258
Pages
Language

EN
English
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Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

2020
July 7
File size

1.1 MB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"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

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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, muttering “Oh God...” over and over until Netflix, greedy for its own bandwidth, reset to the main menu, casting its red glow over him and his guard dogs—identical twin, steel-toothed Rottweilers who both answered to “Jophiel.” Their name was shared for the sake of efficiency in emergency, so that if one of Jim Carrey’s many enemies broke into the house and he had only seconds to act, he could summon both with a breath.

Fearing this was the moment when he would discover his own long-standing nonexistence, questioning even the value of an existence as part of a species forever looping between horror and heartache, he wondered if the latest viral news story vexing his publicists was right. Had he actually died while snowboarding in Zermatt? He’d seen a YouTube video about how time behaves strangely in death, your final seconds distending, yielding rich washes of experience. What if he had died in recent days, arriving not in a hell or a heaven but rather a bedbound purgatory?

He’d heard stories about the Los Angeles morgue. Bored attendants taking gross pictures of the famous fallen, selling them to TMZ for down payments on houses in the Valley. He flipped to YouTube, whose algorithms, like reading his mind, offered a montage of celebrity death photos. A shot of John Lennon. Face puddled on a gurney. Splayed out for the crowd. If they could do this to John Lennon...

His mind now conjured an image of his own lifeless form, swollen and foul, the morgue goons standing above him, cameras blazing.

“Fuck...,” he breathed, unsure if he’d breathed it or not.

He’d gone to the bathroom, trying to reclaim existential certainty with a warm rush of urine through his middle-aged urethra. His heart was racing. What if it failed in his sleep and they found him in the morning, caked in his own excrement? What if the entire flight of paranoia that had brought him to this moment of feared death was a premonition of a future death, the Zermatt snowboarding disaster just fate’s deft misdirection? No, if death should come, he’d look his best—crevice as clean as a whistle.

Thus resolved, he’d sat on his Japanese toilet and evacuated his bowels, wiped himself, and hopped in the shower, thoroughly sponging the orifice, then drying and powdering himself. He moved to the vanity mirror and kept going, trimming his wiry eyebrows, plucking the wolf hairs from his ears, rubbing bronzer across his forehead, his neck, around his clavicles in a broad swoop, so he looked like a Grecian bust.

Now he was ready for the boys at the morgue.

Here was a great star, they’d say. A box-office god of the kind they don’t make anymore.

Now he was marginally less afraid.

He settled back into bed and began watching the first thing Netflix offered: Pompeii Reconstructed: Countdown to Disaster.

“This was the Hamptons or Riviera of the ancient world,” said the host, Ted Berman, an off-brand Indiana Jones in a thrift-store fedora. Once again, Jim felt reality blurring into fiction as a digitally animated cloud of burning ash billowed up from Mount Vesuvius, the computerized notion of a camera’s POV rose with it, high above the city, then stopped and panned into the volcanic crater, which suddenly seemed so very endless and all-devouring that Carrey cried out, “Security inventory!”

“Internal zones clear,” replied his house, in the voice of a Singaporean opium heiress who summered in Provence. “You are safe, Jim Carrey.”

“Defense barrier status?”

“Fully electrified.”

“Let’s do a voltage surge. Just to be sure.”

The television’s light dimmed as he heard a sound like a giant zipper being pulled around the property, twenty thou-sand volts of electricity surging through his razor-wire fence.

“Tell me I’m safe again,” said Carrey. “And loved.”

“You are safe. And loved.”

“Tell me something nice about me.”

“Your monthly water usage is down three percent.”

“Flatterer.”

The television regained brightness. The program resumed.

An earthquake had just rocked Pompeii, a natural phenomenon that the Romans had never experienced. Some thought it was the first act of a miracle and stayed to see more. Others were less sure, fleeing through the city gates.

“No one could have guessed,” said Ted Berman, “that all who remained would die.”

A succession of desperate moments with the documentary’s main characters: a shipping magnate and his pregnant wife; young sisters born into a brothel; a high-ranking magistrate, his family, and their African slave.

Eyes tearing, Jim wondered: Was it wise to keep watching Pompeii, with the images of megalodons still fresh on the brain? With those Neanderthal orphans still paused in their French cave? Charlie Kaufman once told him that cinema’s guiding illusion of distinct frames effecting fluid continuity was the same trick that creates the impression of time in the mind— that past and present are invented concepts, necessary fictions. Were he and the Pompeians just disparate squares of celluloid? Were they feeling the collapse of his world just as he was feeling the destruction of theirs? Was there only one pain? If this was true, then it must hold not only for the original Pompeians but for the actors playing them, people struggling for the next job.

To be seen. To matter.

Money was in charge now. Money had made them all indentured dreamers.

I don’t have to be like this . . . --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07YRW5817
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (July 7, 2020)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 7, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1164 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 258 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #474,190 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #525 in Metaphysical Fiction
- #648 in Biographical Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #1,235 in Dark Humor

Customer Reviews:
4.2 3,910 ratings

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Logan R. Brutsche

A wild ride

Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2023

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At first I kept asking myself whether this was a true story or not, or perhaps truth stretched. But eventually it just didn't matter. Wonderful and strange book.

One person found this helpful

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Lonnie R. West

You will spend countless hours Googling to answer the burning question: Is this real?

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2020

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There are two books that I have found nearly impossible to describe: Dhalgren by Samuel Delaney, and now Memoirs and Misinformation by Jim Carrey. There is no comparison between these books beyond the fact that they both step off the familiar and understood paths of literature to lead you on a journey that has you questioning everything.

Here’s the first tripping point for new readers… There is enough fact in the book that you will spend countless hours Googling names, events, and places to answer the burning question: Is this real?

It’s not a memoir, and it’s not a traditional novel. It’s fiction, yet eloquently laid on in a way that you get a very real sense of the struggles and journey of the author’s mind that are reflected like shards of a broken mirror in this novel.

It’s ironic. Only a few years ago a novel that drops names of almost every A-list celebrity and drags them through revealing, scandalous, and shocking details of their inner lives would have been the subject of retaliatory rage or lawsuits. Yet today we live 24/7 in an age of misinformation where our leaders and media endlessly spew a kaleidoscope of contradictory and inflammatory chaff intended both bait and misdirect… Today we are numb due to overload and largely unable to discern what is real and what is fiction.

Which makes this a perfect time for a book like this.

It’s a wholly entertaining read! I don’t get through 3 or 4 pages without going “WTF? Seriously???” Then either Googling some tidbit I never knew, or feverishly reading on to see what happens next.

Stepping back to a safe distance, I see that the journey is in the tone and artfulness of the misdirection. It feels like watching the world through a madman’s eyes, and perhaps we are. How many times have we thought “I’d love to see, hear, or experience the world the same way that xxxxxxxxx does?” But we never stopped to think that if we could pop inside someone else’s head, that reality they experience probably will seem utterly foreign and confusing to us because we don’t have the same historical lexicon to frame it properly so the images and sounds and feelings make sense.

For all that, I think I understand the fuel that drives Jim Carrey a little better. Or, he’s done a great job of making me think so. Either way, this one stays on the shelf!

30 people found this helpful

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M. R. Van Hogezand

Jim’s crazy mind

Reviewed in the United States on September 20, 2023

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First thinking this would be a true memoir but slowly realizing I am fooled again by the Great Fool who lures you in with tantalizing words into a mesmerizing world. Jim’s words will stretch your mind while you still believe everything said is true and after. Not using vulgarity, gore or other shocking elements, he still manages to tell a tale that is interesting and arousing, informing with insights into successful actors’ existences and the world, present and future, that humanity inhabits shaped by the latest technology.

One person found this helpful

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Phylicia Mason

A dream-like satire about finding inner peace in a world without it.

Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2020

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I just finished reading, and I feel like I am in a daze. I feel a bit broken-hearted and helpless, yet also calm.

I was feeling a lot of anxiety reading it. There’s a lot of ennui, and a loss of control throughout the book. He feels so disconnected, haunted by memories of peace and pleasure, and not really forging a path anywhere exciting.

The “character” of Jim is more concerned with maintenance of “Jim” than dreaming of more. He’s concerned more with the past, and feels powerless within the present and future. So he escapes within, hiding in his home, indulging in food and sex, while wondering what will become of “Jim Carrey” the image. He has become a victim to both the world’s demands and his own ego.

The book is smart in a way that makes the brain dizzy. I feel like I need to read it again to understand more. I want to indulge in interviews to try and pick his brain more, and understand his metaphors. He says so much, but a lot of it feels like inside jokes and dream-like hallucinations. He wrote the book over 8 years with writer Dana Vachon. There are a lot of famous cameos, like “Jim”, they are caricatures of reality.

The photo on the cover of the book was a screenshot taken accidentally when Jim Carrey was told he had 10 minutes to live. (In Hawaii, 2018, when the warning system told everyone they were dying...) He sat down and pondered what he had been grateful for in his life, feeling peace. When he didn’t die, all that was left was the peace and fear within the memory of that moment, and the photo.

I believe that in this book, which is actually a work of satirical science-fiction, he addresses that moment before death when we feel most alive. He releases this image of “Jim Carrey” he has been holding on to so desperately because he realizes it had nothing to do with his essence at all. In many ways he addresses what true love is, and where he can and can’t find it. He makes peace within a crumbling world where peace doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

It resonated, feeling both depressing and inspiring at the same time.

124 people found this helpful

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P. Jackson

Jim Carrey

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 20, 2023

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Big Jim. What’s not to love about him. Read the novel and let that decide for you.

Gemma - Read A Book Gem

A clever parody of Hollywood and fame

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 19, 2023

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This is a very difficult book to describe and review but I will try my best. Part memoir and part novel this book is the story of a version of Jim Carrey having what can only really be described as an existential crisis.

To really appreciate what this book is doing, I think you have to know quite a bit about Jim Carrey. If you are more of a casual fan I would highly recommend watching some interviews and doing some research before picking up this book to get an idea of his philosophies and experiences as they are kind of crucial to the messages in the story.

I actually loved this book for its absurdity. It is a clever parody of Hollywood and fame and a self-aware study of persona in this context. If you can embrace the unpredictable strangeness of it all, there is actually a lot of revealing thoughts and reflections in this book and it becomes quite easy to see how fact and fiction have been woven together.

Carrey himself said that he wants anyone reading this book to just have a really good time and I certainly did. In lots of ways it actually feels like a very fitting format for a memoir from Carrey and, of all the great actors, you are most likely to get as close to the truth of what being famous in Hollywood actually means from him.

My advice for approaching this book is to go in with an open mind, expecting anything, and just let it take you on a ride.

5 people found this helpful

NicE

The best ascent into madness you'll ever witness.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 2, 2023

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Reading this felt like one of those times when you're sleeping and everything seems too real to be a dream and too weird to be real (whatever real is). Big laughs and deep insights - I'll never forget it.

oh, and when you find out about how the book cover came about then it all makes sense.

Amazon Customer

What a trip , no drugs required

Reviewed in Canada on September 7, 2020

Verified Purchase

What a trip.
Carrey and Vachon go all the way into the rabbit hole.
Crazy, crazy and funny trip.
And there's a kind of vagueness to some passages that I just find very appealing (no idea why - it struck a chord, perhaps).
I downloaded the sample , read it and then just had to read the whole thing.
Right after finishing it , questions popped into my mind : was this a drug trip of his? Is it how his mind looks like when he stops taking antipsychotic medication?
Or is it a big joke on the reader?
Who knows? Is there anything to know or learn?
I actually like it when I'm left with more questions than answers.

3 people found this helpful

Hinse Martin

Très drôle

Reviewed in Canada on March 30, 2021

Verified Purchase

Jim Carrey ... une fausse bio à sa hauteur avec son style d'humour disjoncté.

Pas facile à lire en anglais car le vocabulaire utilisé est assez avancé. Beaucoup de référence à Hollywood que je ne connaissais pas. Donc j'ai fais beaucoup de pauses pendant la lecture pour rechercher l'info afin de bien comprendre l'histoire.

Excellent livre.

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