The superstar comedian’s new semi-autobiographical novel was co-written with Dana Vachon, and critics say it has 'gems of comic fantasy and the nuggets of me. Looking for books by Jim Carrey? See all books authored by Jim Carrey, including Memoirs and Misinformation, and How Roland Rolls, and more on ThriftBooks.com. A novel idea And then we have Carrey’s unnerving debut novel, billed as a hilariously snarky and sneaky semi-autobiographical Hollywood story. And although Memoirs and Misinformation is only about 272 pages, it’s a lot to unpack.

Jim Carrey only appeared in one big-screen movie the last four years and that movie was Sonic the Hedgehog. He played the villain, Dr. Robotnik.

The comedic star, who used to be a reliably annual box-office draw, has been plenty busy doing other things. He wrapped up the third season of his canceled TV series on Showtime, Kidding. He wrote a semi-autobiographical novel with Dana Vachon that they released in September. Most visibly, he played presidential candidate Joe Biden toward the end of the year on Saturday Night Live.

Carrey also paints a lot and is active on social media.

But the three roles he played most publicly this year, movie villain, celebrity author, and SNL walk-on talent, most clearly show where the 58-year-old’s head is these days and what kind of legacy he’s still working to carve out.

Domo arigotnik, Dr. Robotnik

In the surprisingly good Sonic film, Carrey goes full blast into the mode that made him famous as a wildly inventive movie presence in movies like Ace Ventura and The Mask. Leaving any shred of subtlety at the door, Carrey brings his vintage A-game to the king of generic, militaristic movie villain that, say, a J.K. Simmons could have played straight, or Will Ferrell or Ben Stiller could have done with a winking irony. Instead, Carrey infuses the part with his own brand of weirdness and physicality that he hasn’t shown on film since he played The Grinch in 2000.

It’s quite a performance, and one that film snobs without kids or any interest in videogame adaptations are unlikely to ever see. As a statement on Carrey, though, the portrayal feels like a triumphant assertion that he can still play those kinds of parts if he wants to, that he’s not too old to throw down, and to do it successfully.

Memoirs Misinformation Jim Carrey

Bad Biden

But meanwhile, people widely criticized Carrey’s take on Biden for SNL, even as it felt like the actor was doing a lot of work, a lot of straining, exhausting work, to get the impression right. It may have been that stench of effort that turned off some critics and viewers. In the end, Carrey modulated the wild portrayal more toward his physical gifts than Biden’s actual persona, even if Jim Carrey got the voice just about perfect.

He’s since bowed out of the role, saying it was only ever supposed to be a six-week gig, but it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that if the impression had been working like comedic dynamite, Lorne Michaels would have found a way to keep Carrey coming back (ask Alec Baldwin).

The SNL gig signaled Carrey as enjoying being part of a comedic institution like SNL, while also wanting to do something, anything, to get Biden elected. He said in a Tweet, “I would love to go forward knowing that Biden was the victor because I nailed that shit. But I am just one in a long line of proud, fighting SNL Bidens!”

A novel idea

And then we have Carrey’s unnerving debut novel, billed as a hilariously snarky and sneaky semi-autobiographical Hollywood story. And although Memoirs and Misinformation is only about 272 pages, it’s a lot to unpack. Here is Jim Carrey trying to break the conventions of a Hollywood tell-all, but insisting that it’s a mix of fiction and his own real life. The experiment doesn’t really work. The clearly real parts read like self pity or self aggrandizement and don’t speak well of Jim Carrey’s self image. And the fictional parts go completely off the rails after about 200 pages of wandering through a doomed Hollywood love-and-sex story and a farcical quest to make a movie about Mao Zedong written by Charlie Kaufman.

There’s a lot of satirical grist, like something that could have appeared in a Bruce Wagner opus a decade ago, with bits that skewer Kelsey Grammar and Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Pitt, showing the emptiness of the homes of the rich and famous. But Carrey’s target always seem to be Carrey, who pathetically fixates on Oscar awards he didn’t win and women who couldn’t love him enough or his inability to reach his full potential as an artist.

Just when you start to wonder if this is Carrey’s way of letting us know he has become emotionally unhinged and increasingly detached from reality over the last 20 years as his career has descended from previous heights, the novel becomes Mars Attacks! but much less funny. It’s also icky in the ways that it calls out Carrey’s past romances and traumatic family relationships in ways that are probably deeply uncomfortable for all involved, Jim Carrey included.

That’s a shame because there’s some good writing in Memoirs and Misinformation and some truly inspired comedy, such as the heroic, Earth-defending role it creates for Nicholas Cage, “a man whose artistic bravery had always given him courage.”

Carrey and Vachon gift poignant life to some ideas on the near future of VR-style filmmaking and the use of never-aging digital likenesses of actors. They spend a lot of time weighing the power dynamics of relationships between stars and non-stars. And the artistic hubris of trying to make a film about making a film about Carrey portraying Chinese communist leader is convincingly bonkers. I await the spinoff novel that’s just about Charlie Kaufman as a modern-day Hunter S. Thompson.

But these great ideas never pay dividends as Carrey touches on and abandons them in order to barrel toward a ridiculous, nihilistic, and unsatisfying finale. Like the SNL gig, the Sonic movie, and a lot of Carrey’s roles in the 2010s, the book is the result of a wandering, restless mind that wants to express everything and settle on nothing. Perhaps this will lead to some sort of artistic breakthrough, but for now it’s nice to know that Jim Carrey hasn’t stopped trying to find ways to let us know that he’s still funny and that he still wants to entertain us.

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• December 21, 1999
• January 3, 2019

NEW YORK (AP) — 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 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.”

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 3-D. Oh, and an apocalypse is approaching.

Jim Carrey Novel Cover

It may sound far-out, but for Carrey, truth lies in fiction. Even fiction in which Kelsey Grammar and U.F.O.s collide.

“There’s a lot of real feeling in this book,” said Carrey in a Zoom interview from his home in Hawaii. “It may be done in an out-there way but it sure is real to me.”

“Memoirs and Misinformation” is the latest reinvention of the 58-year-old star of “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “The Mask,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “The Truman Show.” After veering into painting and political cartoons, it’s yet another new medium for Carrey. (Vachon wrote 2007’s “Mergers & Acquisitions.”) The book, Carrey says, “is dearer to me than anything I’ve done.”

The “illusion of persona” is the chief subject of “Memoirs and Misinformation.” In the last decade or more, Carrey has worked to deconstruct the best-known version of himself and make room for an emotional life that his public identity — “unflappably fun,” Carrey calls it — didn’t allow. He has spoken about bouts with depression and his ongoing spiritual journey. He has worked less frequently and sought satisfaction away from Hollywood.

“All personas after a while become sarcophagal. You want to claw your way out of them,” says Carrey. “You’re met all the time with ‘Why don’t you just be funny?’ I go, ‘Well, funny is one of the fingers on my hand.’ But I’m learning to use the whole hand.”

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.

“From an early age, what I’ve always noticed about Jim is that he can change form,” says Vachon, who, after flying out to finish the book, has been stranded in Hawaii by the pandemic. “His memoir needed to be one that did that because that’s his truth.”

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.”

“I watched him be animated and loving in sharing this gift that he had. I went: That’s a great thing to be,” says Carrey, the youngest of four. “I could make my mother feel better. A lot of comics come from moms in need. My mother was a child of alcoholics and she didn’t get the love that she needed, so her kids were there to give her that love that she was missing. Especially me. I thought I could heal her. I thought I could save her life.”

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.”

The book reminds Carrey’s longtime friend and “The Cable Guy” producer Judd Apatow of when he first met Carrey. He was then a successful impressionist who, “on a dime,” stopped doing impressions and began improvising his entire act, Apatow recalls. “It was like he just cracked open his brain to see what was inside.”

“We all start out young and ambitious and we have our dreams and we think our dreams will make us happy,” says Apatow. “And I think Jim was aware very early on that that’s not how it would go down.”

Carrey isn’t sure when he began to feel “Jim Carrey” cleaving away from himself. Fame was fun, he says, until it wasn’t.

“I tripped along for a long time,” Carrey says. “No one understands the value of anonymity until they lose it. You could say, ‘Well, that’s what you asked for.’ Yes, but it’s what a child asks for before they become an adult and understands what something means. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but it’s an odd thing and it keeps you in the house.”

There were low points. After the apparent suicide of Carrey’s former girlfriend Cathriona White, he was sued for wrongful death by White’s husband and her mother. Carrey denied involvement and counter-sued. By 2018, the suits were dismissed. “Memoirs and Misinformation” features plenty of farce, but there are also scenes of Hollywood tragedy that echo some of Carrey’s heartaches.

“It really became an exercise of being able to say the things that are important to say in the most creative and abstract way possible and to deal with real painful and jarring movements in my life,” says Carrey.

Jim Carrey New Book

Lately, Carrey has seemed to find an equilibrium. He’s starring in “Kidding,” a Showtime series with darker and more melancholic tones, and he was widely praised for his performance in “Hungry Hungry Hippo” -- correction, “Sonic the Hedgehog.” He has been busy sending out letters and book copies to everyone who makes cameos in the book.

“You can’t make a book about persona without personas,” says Carrey, quickly noting “it’s done with love.” “One day I had to call Nic (Cage) and say, ‘I wrote you into my fictitious memoir.’ I hardly got the sentence out and he said, ‘I’m so honored.’ He was amazed I had given him all the best lines.”

Is Carrey at peace? “I get there,” he says. As eager as he seems to be to take “Jim Carrey” and tear him to pieces, he seems — at least through a computer window thousands of miles away — at ease in his own skin.

“Whatever it was, it was the perfect cocktail to get us here to this moment,” Carrey says of his life. “So I don’t regret it at all.”

___

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Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP