Memoirs and Misinformation

A fictionalized version of the real-life movie star Jim Carrey is the protagonist of this satirical novel, which blends semiautobiographical detail with absurdist fiction to explore celebrity, identity, mortality, and the machinery of Hollywood. The narrative opens with Carrey in deep personal crisis, alone in his fortified Brentwood estate during a brutal Los Angeles heat wave. Bearded and bleary-eyed after months of breakdown, he lies naked in bed binge-watching Netflix documentaries, flanked by his twin steel-toothed Rottweilers, both named Jophiel. Documentaries on ancient predators, human genocide, and the destruction of Pompeii trigger cascading existential dread. He texts his friend, the actor Nicolas Cage, but receives no reply. As he weeps over Pompeii's dead, he recalls the only purely selfless love he has known: a brief romance with the singer Linda Ronstadt in 1982, who sang him the Mexican love song "Volver, Volver."

A flashback recounts Carrey's recent professional peak, a $220 million global blockbuster, and his subsequent decline. While channel-surfing, he discovers Georgie DeBusschere, a little-known actress on the TNT series Oksana, whose face his subconscious identifies as his mother Kathleen's. A childhood flashback reveals his father Percy's financial failures, his mother's dependence on painkillers, and young Jim's earliest comic routines performed to cheer her. Georgie's backstory is equally stark: One of eight children from rural Iowa, she rose to infamy on Survivor: Lubang by betraying a vulnerable castmate, then spent years struggling in Hollywood before securing her Oksana role through a coercive arrangement with the show's creator, Mitchell Silvers. Watching Georgie's final episode, Carrey becomes convinced she is his soul mate.

Carrey invites Georgie to a meditation led by Natchez Gushue, a disgraced guru cast out by Deepak Chopra. Celebrity guests including Gwyneth Paltrow, Sean Penn, and Cage share disturbing memories; Cage describes a vision of an alien invasion that later proves prophetic. Carrey holds Georgie's hand throughout, reading their connection as destiny, while she studies the A-list guests and recognizes their world as a rigged game.

Their romance accelerates. At Carrey's Malibu beach house, he gazes into Georgie's eyes, seeing his mother's, in a transparent search for lost maternal love. Within six months they hold a spirit ceremony, a wedding-like ritual rooted in Melanesian traditions, at the Malibu home of the actor Kelsey Grammer. Cage, who has learned of Georgie's troubling past, warns Carrey, but Carrey refuses to listen. On a lavish New York honeymoon, Carrey buys Georgie a Frida Kahlo self-portrait at auction for over $3 million, though the certificate lists it as his sole property.

The novel introduces an extraterrestrial subplot. Silvers is visited by Tan Calvin, an intergalactic reality producer who announces that earth's "programming" is being canceled, then compels Silvers to shoot himself. With Oksana canceled, Georgie's career stalls. As she approaches 40, she asks Carrey for a child, but he refuses. His own career suffers after his film I Love You Phillip Morris triggers a religious crusade. Disney, Paramount, and Sony freeze his projects. His managers, Wink Mingus and Al Spielman II, urge him to take a safe family film or face playing Vegas lounges.

Guidance arrives in the form of Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, who has been haunted since a trip to China where mudslides unearthed a mass grave from Mao Zedong's Great Famine. Kaufman proposes a film in which Mao's spirit is reborn inside the mind of a tormented actor, "Jim Carrey." At the Saharan Motor Hotel, Kaufman enlists the actor Anthony Hopkins in the character preparation. Over days they watch famine footage while Carrey begins channeling the dictator.

Carrey plunges into Maoist immersion, absorbing Mao's writings until he views the Disney Play-Doh Fun Factory project offered by his agents as capitalist propaganda. He and Georgie plan her 40th birthday party as a sabotage operation: The Brentwood estate is transformed into a Shanghai villa, and Carrey delivers a Maoist speech denouncing Hollywood, capped by Mickey and Minnie Mouse cakes impaled on pikestaffs. The Disney executives flee. The party introduces Helena San Vicente, a Monroe impersonator, and the evening ends in a threesome.

Georgie sets rules for Helena's continued visits, but Carrey breaks them. During a secret encounter, Helena reveals her real name is Celeste and confesses her love. Carrey rejects her, and she overdoses on his prescription pills. Meanwhile, Georgie has traveled to Palm Springs for a career-changing audition with film director Quentin Tarantino. Before the meeting, she receives Vividerm, a new cosmetic filler, and has a catastrophic allergic reaction that paralyzes her face. Dismissed from the audition, she returns home, discovers surveillance footage of Helena's visit, confronts Carrey, takes the Frida Kahlo painting, and leaves for good.

Carrey's handlers reveal that Kaufman's Mao project was a dead end and present Hungry Hungry Hippos in Digital 3D as his redemption vehicle. After a visit from his daughter Jane and six-year-old grandson Jackson, who reads him the myth of Prometheus, Carrey accepts. He is taken to a remote desert facility run by TPG (the Texas Pacific Group), the private equity firm that owns his talent agency, Creative Artists Agency (CAA). Wearing a motion-capture suit and augmented-reality goggles, he enters a digital world and reunites with a character bearing the licensed voice and personality of the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, his old mentor. The director, Lanny Lonstein, intends to retell The Epic of Gilgamesh, humanity's oldest surviving narrative, beneath the children's film surface, and orchestrates Rodney's death to mirror the epic's themes of loss. Carrey is devastated. TPG then reveals their true aim: They have extracted enough data to complete the film and all sequels without him. Seduced by visions of an idealized future, Carrey whispers his acceptance and falls onto a digitally rendered bed.

He wakes in his Brentwood home as Los Angeles burns. A tree crashes through his roof. Clutching Charlie Chaplin's cane, his most sacred possession, he is rescued by the Daughters of Anomie (DoA), an elite group of radicalized female war veterans with titanium prosthetics, including Bathsheba Brenner, a Harvard-educated Green Beret; Carla, a West Point graduate; and Sally Mae, a marine sniper. They kidnap Carrey to collect "good seed" for rebuilding civilization after capitalism's collapse. Cage directs them from Carrey's Malibu house to the coast, where they find Penn, Paltrow, and Grammer. An alien armada of hundreds of ships hovers offshore, emitting a rose-gold light.

Tan Calvin broadcasts globally, revealing himself as the architect of earth's story and announcing planetary cancellation through golden light beams that offer painless rapture. Kanye West, broadcasting from a nearby beach house, proclaims himself the aliens' emissary and names his wife Kim Kardashian the "Star Mother." Kardashian ascends first, and millions follow. Carrey enters the light field, feeling all burdens dissolve into joyful memories of his mother's laughter and Linda Ronstadt beside him. Cage and the others lasso him and drag him out.

Civilization collapses. Calvin sends giant robotic Striders, piloted by serpentine aliens, as mop-up crews. The survivors stage a last stand at the Malibu Country Mart. Cage, immune to the Striders' death rays due to a DNA mutation, charges with a medieval sword and destroys several machines, but larger Super Striders descend with rays to which he is not immune. Penn and Cage are killed. Sally Mae, Carla, and a wounded Paltrow escape on a motorcycle. Carrey runs for the sea.

He finds a rubber dinghy and escapes onto the open ocean. Adrift and dehydrating, his language and memories dissolve. His father Percy appears beside him, taking his wounded hands and whispering that they are not separate, that one spirit guides all things. Carrey lets a loose tooth fall into the sea, certain that whatever his body is, it is not him. His mind arrives at a final awareness of wholeness, not separate from the stars. The novel closes with soft clouds and drizzle falling on his body as he reaches for a name that no longer matters, and a voice from the rain whispers it back.