Review of Memoirs and Misinformation by Jim Carrey

The average star rating of this book is under 3 stars. I’m one of the few who enjoyed it and couldn’t put it down.

It can only be compared to the works of Mark Leyner and Antkind by Charlie Kaufman (who plays a role in the book). If it had been written by Mark Leyner, it probably would’ve been accepted. It’s a messy, bonkers, bizarro satire. I wonder why Jim Carrey, after publicly announcing his retirement, decided to put out this unexplainable anti-memoir. The title is misleading, and the fact it was cowritten by an author with only one book to his credit (that book’s average star rating is also under 3 stars) is even more baffling.
Carrey spoofs himself here in a performance comparable to that of his work in The Mask in terms of absurd intensity. People died laughing over his brilliant personae in Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Liar Liar, and The Cable Guy. His presence was cherished in such films as Grinch and Sonic. His career was idiosyncratic and inimitable. But when he puts on a show in between the creepily designed covers of a novel, no one applauds. He raked in $20-30 million for most of his major roles and amassed $180 million before deciding to hang up his puttified mask. Here we see him in the aftermath, basking in his petering fame and nourishing paranoid fantasies, engaging in frightful experimental method acting a la his Andy Kaufman phase, channeling chairman Mao in an abortive Charlie Kaufman project which wears away his sanity while floating naked in his swimming pool, acting like a character from Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis everywhere else, having believable conversations with screen stars and the after images of proprietary Marilyn Monroe impersonators, gawking at digital recreations of Brando, and finally descending into a War of the Worlds scenario with his pals Sean Penn, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Nick Cage.
You can tell from the wacko plot and the meandering-off-the-deep-end lampooning, Carrey wants desperately to make us laugh, to inflame our imaginations like he once did. He misses that feeling of capturing the hearts of millions. He endlessly wallows in the self-delusion of his magnetic ambiance, while committing the cliched thought crimes of a typical ultra-rich celebrity in a rigged system of cartoonification, mourning his ego after Popper’s Penguins, and dreaming of a psyche-shattering virtual Hungry Hippos franchise which will resuscitate his demented remains.
I found it unhinged, hilarious, perfect escapism. Grounded in the gross cultural abyss of our pre-apocalyptic times. A freakish pastiche of jaded puppet shows, where an aging comedian inflicts his repressed postmodern dream sequences upon a rapt audience of automatons. He has gouged out his own soul in a desperate attempt at performance art only to flail and belly flop in his skivvies while emitting a plaintive whimper. A scathing indictment of his midlife crisis, casting himself as the tragic clown without make up or wig, the star of a Truman Show with a set the size of planet earth, a wanderer in an Eternal Spotless mind, ignoring the massive potholes of addiction, conspiracy theories, and abuse, all the while feeding the studio leeches who demand he become Joe Biden’s doppelganger.