A quirky and inspiring story.
A successful California restaurateur dishes on his “fall” into success.
In 2014, then-23-year-old Fall took a chance and opened his first bar. His idea was simple: to reinvigorate a staid Los Angeles nightclub scene and transform it into an experience that intermingled “ideas and friendships and art.” The popularity of this bar and others quickly transformed Fall into a “thing,” but he soon realized that his real interest was food and creating unique dining experiences. His limited knowledge of the restaurant world had come through a mother who had managed a Skid Row cafe. Despite countless challenges, the author dove into his work with Nighthawk, a diner named after the 1942 Edward Hopper painting. Nighthawk featured a “live DJ ‘jukebox’ ” and served breakfast and breakfast-themed cocktails like his famous “spiked cereal milk.” Other mixed media–style restaurants followed, and Fall eventually landed in Forbes magazine’s “30 under 30.” Meanwhile, he found himself reckoning with an extreme anxiety that threatened to shut down his creative output. Pulling no punches, the author discusses how therapy and medication helped him navigate his mental health issues and allowed him to embrace neurodivergence as the source for the “loose balloon” ideas he credits for his successes. Remaining authentic and vulnerable in spaces overrun by toxic masculinity also became part of his regimen to remain healthy. “I’d always grown up with the cliché that men hate to talk, but it’s just not true,” he writes. “All you need is a few positive experiences to realize that wow—talking about our feelings actually makes things better.” In that spirit, Fall discusses Alan, his anxiety, and Bob, his inner critic, with refreshing openness and humor. At a time when the highly flawed alpha male credo of “stronger, harder, better” still dominates ideas about success, Fall’s book offers a welcome take on both masculinity and the nature of creativity.
A quirky and inspiring story.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780306830952
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hachette Go
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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
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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