Matthew McConaughey, 55, revealed in his new poetry collection that he quit smoking marijuana after getting so stoned he played Janet Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes” on repeat and missed his own birthday party.
The Oscar winner details the night in his third book, “Poems & Prayers,” which hit shelves on Tuesday, September 16. McConaughey writes that he used to smoke what he called “Mexican dirt weed,” describing it in the book as “the kind where you passed the joint around, laughed, got the munchies, and hopefully snuck off for some good sex.” But he noted that marijuana changed over time, becoming something far more paralyzing than pleasurable.
“Instead of being a tiny toke of easy inspiration, it turned into a paralysis puff of f—ing analysis,” McConaughey wrote. He described finding himself “stuck for hours staring at that one grain in that one piece of wood in my ceiling rafters, thinking it was trying to tell me something important. It wasn’t.”
The turning point came on the night of his birthday. McConaughey said that he sat in his car listening to Jackson’s 1993 hit and became emotionally overwhelmed. “I listened to Janet Jackson’s ‘That’s the Way Love Goes’ 24 times in a row,” he remembered. “And when I finally got out of the car to go into my birthday, everybody had left. It was over. I missed it!”
He elaborated in his book that he “couldn’t quit playing one song over and over in my car” while high, and that it had somehow become “more important” to keep listening than to show up to his own celebration. He said he was “sitting there crying over that song. I thought it was more important than celebrating my birth.”
McConaughey drew a larger lesson from the episode, writing in the collection: “If every dance step matters too much, we never find our rhythm. If we give every note too much credit, we’ll never hear the song. That’s why I quit smoking,” He said he “still like the tune” despite what happened.
The book represents a departure from the memoir format of his previous bestseller “Greenlights,” which was published in 2020. “Poems & Prayers” compiles material McConaughey has written since age 18, including poems, “ditties,” song lyrics, and prayers spanning his pre-fame days through his current life as a husband and father of three with wife Camila Alves.
In the book’s introduction, McConaughey, 55, explained his turn toward poetry amid what he sees as a cultural crisis of truth. “I’ve always relied on logic to make sense of myself and the world,” he wrote. “A prescriptionist at heart, I’ve always looked to reason to find the rhyme, the practical to get to the mystical, the choreography to find the dance, the proof to get to the truth, and reality to get to the dream,” He continued, “I’ve been finding that tougher to do lately. Seems to me the facts have become unreliably overrated.”
McConaughey said that looking back at his early journals, the first 14 days of material were “full of shame and remorse.” But he found a different perspective over time. “I started noticing like, ‘Well, dude, you put yourself in a position to get humiliated the next month and learn your lesson,'” he explained. “Instead of feeling the shame and the guilt, I started to chuckle and go, ‘That’s kind of how life goes, isn’t it?'”
In the viral moment that preceded his literary revelation, McConaughey had long been open about his marijuana use, even telling interviewers in years past that he came up with his famous “alright, alright, alright” catchphrase while “high as a kite” during filming of 1993’s “Dazed and Confused.” His 1999 arrest for marijuana possession while playing bongo drums naked in his Texas home became a defining early-career tabloid story. The new book marks his most detailed accounting yet of how recreational use eventually curdled into something he needed to leave behind.
McConaughey is scheduled to continue his book tour with appearances in Austin.