VACHON One of the first times he contacted me, he was watching the John Barrymore “Jekyll and Hyde,” which came to inform the story.

But even the fictional qualities of the book reveal a truth.ĭana, what was it like for you to get to know the real Jim, as opposed to the version of himself that he presents onscreen? That world and all its excesses and gluttony and self-focus and vanity. Of the artist, of the celebrity, of the star. But who is he?ĬARREY Jim Carrey in this book is really a representative - he’s an avatar of anybody in my position. The protagonist of this novel is named Jim Carrey and he has lived a life very similar to yours. But even when we butted heads, we always came up with something more interesting than we had initially conceived. It started out as a little volley back and forth, here and there, and in the last few years it was eight hours, 12 hours most days, just grinding together in a room. It’s a labor of love that we couldn’t stop. After our first meeting, I was like, “He’s a lovely person - I’ll definitely never talk to him again.” But we kept talking.ĭid you ever consider writing a factual memoir of Jim’s life?ĬARREY There’s nothing, at this point in my artistic life, more boring than the idea of writing down the actual events of my life in some chronological order. VACHON We had a manager in common who said, “Maybe you guys should talk,” and nothing came quite of that. But I looked at it and I thought, it would be great to make something really true with an artist of that caliber. ” I’m something of a Hitchensian skeptic and he’s very mystical. VACHON So in our first communication, I replied, “BOING that. The energy that does everything positive in the world. And one morning I looked at Twitter and Jim had tweeted “BOING.”ĬARREY I was just trying to create another version of the Force or chi. I was in Williamsburg, everything was closing and all the construction was arrested. JIM CARREY We met about nine, 10 years ago, when Twitter first became a big thing and people were still experimenting with it.ĭANA VACHON It had been a really depressing winter. How did the two of you first get connected? These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Speaking together over Zoom, Carrey and Vachon talked about the making of “Memoirs and Misinformation,” the joys of playing on the boundary between fact and fiction, and how they expect Tom Cruise will react to it.

The Jim Carrey of “Memoirs and Misinformation” also happens to share a name and several key biographical details with Jim Carrey, the ever-changing star of films like “The Mask,” “The Truman Show,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Sonic the Hedgehog,” who wrote the book with the novelist Dana Vachon (“Mergers and Acquisitions”). invasion and rubbing elbows with the likes of Nicolas Cage, Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins. While he searches for meaning in his life and career, this Carrey is also trying to choose among starring roles in a Mao Zedong biopic and studio movies based on children’s toys contending with catastrophic wildfires, an all-female cadre of eco-terrorists and a U.F.O.

So begins a satirical adventure in which Carrey plumbs the chasms of Hollywood’s self-obsessed culture. His successes as an actor, in projects both comedic and dramatic, are distant objects in the rearview mirror, and now he is fixated on his own inevitable demise and the eventual end of the universe. At the start of the novel “Memoirs and Misinformation,” we find Carrey, its protagonist, in the midst of an existential crisis, crushed by self-doubt and confined to his Los Angeles home, where he subsists on a diet of Netflix, YouTube and TMZ.

Jame carry