With a satirical, fictional ‘anti-memoir,’ Jim Carrey gets real

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 bingewatching Netflix while nursing a split from Renée 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.”

Make no mistake: “Memoirs and Misinformation” is funny. But it’s also a sober meditation on mortality, selfhood and the drive to entertain. A conventional memoir was never an option. “At the very least they’re reordered for effect,” says Carrey.

For Carrey, a cartoonishly malleable, head-to-toe comedian of absurdist abandon, the urge to perform began in his working-class upbringing outside Toronto with a mother who fought depression and prescription pills and a father he calls “a magical being.”

That desire to be bigger than yourself and to bring joy to others is something Carrey both values sincerely and considers dangerous. “If it becomes an addiction to exceptionalism,” he says, “that’s a bad place to be.”

Chris Pizzello / Associated Press Ron Wood, from left, Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones are releasing a new version of their 1973 album “Goats Head Soup” with three unheard tracks.