Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/AlamyĪt dinner one Wednesday night, his father asks for more potatoes. McConaughey as Jake Tyler Brigance in A Time to Kill, 1996. “Yes,” writes McConaughey, “he called his shot all right.” His father broke his mother’s finger four times, “to get it out of his face” he later died from a heart attack mid-intercourse, as he’d always said he would. McConaughey’s parents divorced twice and married thrice, to each other. (“I’ve always loved bumper stickers, so much so that I’ve stuck bumper to sticker and made them one word, bumpersticker.”) This proclamation, on a bumper sticker reproduced in the book, captures the young McConaughey’s home life: full of love and also violence. ‘To lose the power of confrontation is to lose the power of unity’ No, you’re Little Mr Texas.” McConaughey calls this the lesson of “audacious existentialism”. When he confronted his mother, she said the winner was wealthy and won with his fancy suit. Last year, McConaughey came across the same photo in a scrapbook. Through it all he’s always been Winner, Little Mr Texas, 1977. He has weathered hard winters of the soul, and long professional droughts. He has been up and down, endured boom and bust, gone from livin on easy street to trailer parks. Now 50, McConaughey is an Oscar-winning actor, a bankable star and still one of the most handsome men in Hollywood. “Look at you: winner, Little Mr Texas, 1977.” Every morning at breakfast, she gestures to it. He wins, and his mom hangs a framed picture of him holding his trophy on the kitchen wall. When McConaughey is eight years old, she enters him into the Little Mr Texas contest. “Like a good southern boy should”, McConaughey begins with his mother.

‘The value of denial depends on one’s level of commitment’

Love Letters in the Sand by Diann Hunt