THE REAL UNTRUTH
Canadian comic-actor Jim Carrey has co-written a satirical novel about himself
Memoirs and Misinformation
Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon Penguin Random House
Early on in Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon’s novel, Memoirs and Misinformation, there is a madcap passage where three of the book’s very famous characters behave very badly.
Carrey, who is also the protagonist of the tale, is in a room at the fleabag Saharan Motor Hotel on Sunset Boulevard with director-screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and Sir Anthony Hopkins. They are preparing for an unusual movie, even by Kaufman standards.
Hopkins is pompously pontificating about the craft. A paranoid Kaufman is wearing footed Lone Ranger pyjamas and toting an ivory-handled pistol. Carrey is in the middle of a existential crisis and trying to channel the spirit of Mao Zedong. We won’t give specific spoilers, but the scene will eventually involve bad shrimp lo mein from the Neon Dragon Bistro, a befuddled delivery boy and a food fight that escalates into a wrestling match that escalates into gunplay.
“I love that piece!” Carrey says with a wide grin in a joint Facetime interview alongside Vachon with Postmedia. “That’s the Saharan Hotel. That’s the first place I ever stayed in Los Angeles when I first came. That’s why it’s in there.”
But the Jim Carrey in the novel, to be released July 7, has very different struggles than the real Jim Carrey would have had as a newbie to Tinseltown.
He is already a superstar when we meet him in the book, albeit a reclusive one suffering through a mental and spiritual breakdown. He’s feeling underappreciated by Hollywood, snubbed by Oscar and betrayed by handlers who want to steer him toward soulless mega-budgeted, family friendly blockbusters. While the above passage is one of many laugh-out-loud moments in Memoirs and Misinformation, it actually seems quite tame compared to the chaos that is to come. By the end of the book, readers will have been introduced to spiritual cults, raging wildfires, a gang of brave female eco-terrorists, an alien invasion and Rodney Dangerfield digitally reincarnated as a rhinoceros. It turns out this frantic escalation of the plot is a reflection of Carrey’s working relationship with Vachon, an author and journalist who first connected with the actor over Twitter in 2009 and spent eight years co-writing Memoirs and Misinformation with him. In short, they would egg each other on.
“We were constantly daring each other forward,” says Vachon. “It consisted of great ideas being shared at night and then the next day someone would call and say ‘But what about this?’”
What is sure to gain a good deal of attention is how Carrey and Vachon name names. Alongside
Hopkins and Kaufman are a parade of real-life celebrities that factor into the plot. While the depictions aren’t particularly mean-spirited, they aren’t always flattering either. Most come across as strange, self-obsessed and vain.
Kelsey Grammer, Sean Penn, Gwyneth Paltrow, Quentin Tarantino, John Travolta and a delightfully unhinged Nicolas Cage — who figures quite prominently in the plot — are just a few of the characters who appear. Carrey recently told the New York Times that he plans to send every celebrity depicted in the book a copy of the novel and letter of explanation to coincide with its release. But he doesn’t seem all that worried.
“It’s good-natured,” Carrey says. “Some of it is a bit edgy, but it’s nothing I wouldn’t do with my brother or my friend. It comes from a place of love. I admire all the personalities in the book in some way or another and I also think some of them are odd and silly.”
Besides, as Vachon points out, the most unflattering portrait in the book may be the one of Carrey himself.
“We went out of our way to splay me open and leave me bleeding on a rock while the gulls pulled my entrails out,” says Carrey.
“I can say this, he can’t: Great artists have a fearlessness about them and his fearlessness is one of the things that really allows the project to work because he has to go deeper into himself than anyone else in order for it to all hold together,” Vachon says.
While the book can certainly be broad in its comedy, it is not without tender, poignant and occasionally horrifying moments. It satirizes the mechanics of the movie business and celebrity culture but also explores deeper and elemental questions about what may be next for the “human family,” Carrey says.
“There has never been a generation of people that didn’t think the world was going to end in their time,” he says. “I think the world is ending, but it’s not the ending that they may expect. I think it’s the crowning of a new world. It’s a painful labour and I truly believe we are coming through this pregnancy, this really problematic pregnancy, and we are going to have something very beautiful on the other end.”
While the fictional Carrey may possess traits the real Carrey does not and vice versa, the book is full of references to his real films, both the commercially successful ones and the box office bombs. It also includes a good deal of flashbacks to Carrey’s early years growing up in Ontario that explore his complicated relationships with his family and home.
“That’s who I am,” he says. “I had an extraordinary and challenging and sometimes incredibly painful existence growing up in Canada. There’s the sublime experience of freezing-rain day where you put your skates on and skate to the store and then there’s working a factory in Scarborough and thinking of nothing but getting in a fight and losing faith in the world because it turned on my father.”
When reading the book, it’s difficult not the hear the voices of the celebrity characters, which brings up the question of whether Memoirs and Misinformation could realistically be made into a film. Despite the tricky logistics of making a movie involving so many famous faces, it certainly has all the ingredients for an exhilarating, action-packed dark comedy.
Carrey says he and Vachon want to give Memoirs and Misinformation its own time and space as a novel, but admits they have bandied about a few ideas of how it could be adapted in the future.
“My idea was to have other famous actors playing other famous people,” he says. “You know, have Christian Bale playing Nicolas Cage, Ryan Gosling as me and I would play my father. Those types of things are really fun considerations.”