Memoirs and Misinformation

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

JIM CARREY is an award-winning actor and artist. 

DANA VACHON is the author of the novel Mergers and Acquisitions. His essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, and Vanity Fair. He lives in Brooklyn.

"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