NEW YORK — When Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon handed in the book they had toiled on for eight years — a satirical “anti-memoir” about Carrey’s life but with increasingly extreme flights of absurdity — to Sonny Mehta, the late Knopf publisher said he would put it out as a novel. Carrey and Vachon protested.
“But Sonny, the project was to blow up the celebrity memoir,” they argued.
“Well, yes,” replied Mehta. “But how then would you explain the flying saucers?”
“Memoirs and Misinformation,” which was published Tuesday, is not an easy book to label. It opens with Carrey binge-watching Netflix while nursing a split from Renee Zellweger (who, here, leaves him for a bullfighter), pleading for his home security system to “Tell me I’m safe and loved” and craving the box-office success that brought him “closer to God.”
There’s much that’s straight from Carrey’s life, but it’s an inflated version of his persona — “a hyperactive child making yuk-yuks,” as the book describes him. With overtones of “Network,” Carrey skewers celebrity, Hollywood, ego and himself. There’s Brazilian jiu-jitsu with Nic Cage, spiritual guru gatherings with Kelsey Grammar and a Tom Cruise referenced only as “Laser Jack Lightning.” Carrey, himself, is juggling movie options: a Mao Zedong film by Charlie Kaufman or “Hungry Hungry Hippos” in 3D. Oh, and an apocalypse is approaching.
It may sound far-out, but for Carrey, truth lies in fiction. Even fiction in which Kelsey Grammar and UFOs collide.