A heartening guidebook for finding healing through connection with one’s core values and with the world.
Teacher and activist Boxey frames recovery from addiction as a communal effort in this nonfiction guide.
The author grew up with an alcoholic father and had her own “party girl” era that began when she was a teen. These facts are related: the trauma of her childhood led to her own less-than-healthy choices as a young adult. As Boxey began her own journey to recovery, she found these words of her father’s, which her family had adopted as a credo, could serve as her guide: “You are part of a family. Be true to yourself. Glorify God in all that you do.” In this book, she expands upon these principles for those seeking sobriety. Family, she argues, is a product of our hardwired need to connect; addiction, on the other hand, is often the result of individualism run amok. Boxey asserts: “We’re attempting to meet needs that can’t be met alone, no matter how hard we try. Instead of asking for help, we turn to comforts and coping tools, or self-medication.” For the author, “family” extends beyond her family of origin to include all of humanity. Boxey posits that being in good relationships with others begins with living one’s values fully, without fear or shame, and without lies. As for glorifying God, the author explicitly states that this “is not a Christian book.” Here, “God” means higher power—or, as Alcoholics Anonymous puts it, “a power greater than ourselves.” (Among the exercises offered at the end of each chapter is one designed to help those raised without religion to define what a “higher power” might mean for them.) Boxey is a gentle coach; she recognizes that habits we may regard as bad might have begun as adaptive traits—that is, behaviors that, at some point in our lives, helped us to survive. She is also refreshingly honest about the fact that she is speaking from a place of imperfection: One section of the book is called “THE LIBERATING EXPERIENCE OF BEING A FUCKUP.”
A heartening guidebook for finding healing through connection with one’s core values and with the world.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781959524021
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Rise Books
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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