"Vanishment, obliteration—strange imaginings for an aspiring star."

Here's a delightfully surreal experiment in tweezing out the meaning of identity and the frailty/fungibility of meaning in a world where being known, no matter how good it might feel, cannot save you from the inherent violence of existence itself. "Extinction is destiny, that's never been a secret." And if that's the case, why shouldn't somebody like Jim Carrey's story be extravagantly splashed across a canvas of silliness and grimness and pathos and fear and sheer absurdist (yet ultimately not-that-absurd) verve?

In MEMOIRS AND MISINFORMATION, Carrey and Vachon use a spiraling, often laugh-out-loud meditation on apocalypse to wonder: Is there any value in existing "as part of a species forever looping between horror and heartache"? Is there only one pain, experienced simultaneously by all living creatures, present and past? What's the point of identity, of relationship, of interconnectedness? Especially if "the mind is untrustworthy, a sewer of illusions" and "as all the world’s minds are linked together, the sewer runs ever fouler, ever deeper"? And what does the destruction of our planet mean when "a man and his world are entwined. You can’t demolish one without injuring the other"?

Carrey and Vachon posit these questions against a Californian backdrop of fame -- what it means to want it, to get it, to go on thirsting for it, and what it could possibly mean, perhaps, to relinquish it. As the fictional(?) Jim Carrey himself says late in the book, "I think the death fear’s just so strong the ego does anything to block it out. We hide in grandiose stories. Superheroes, God-men. Fame is a mind plague; we thought it’d make us immortal as it ate up our precious time." Of course, if aspiring to fame stems not just from our desire to be known but from our desire to defy death itself, it makes sense that the primary foot soldiers in this book's climactic fight against global annihilation are celebrities. But the flip-side of apocalypse--the resignation to it, the welcoming of it--is on display here too, with a fictionalized Charlie Kaufman remarking early in the book, "We’re at game’s end, cowboys. All of us. With only one move left: complete annihilation. Of lives, of loves. Languages and species. Somewhere it’s all already ended. All the words forgotten. This life is just a sloppy flashback."

Although populated by satirical caricatures of the likes of Nicolas Cage, Kelsey Grammar, Anthony Hopkins, Sean Penn, and others, the world of MEMOIRS AND MISINFORMATION remains grounded in observations that ring true. For example, that "Los Angeles is a city of lucid dreams, built on a desert, illuminated by wonders but plagued by fears of sudden erasure." And that "the American desert is a pram of horror and wonder, the world’s last unfiltered portal to the beyond, a place where heaven and hell both touch the earth."

And where heaven and hell meet, everything else falls apart. At one point late in the book, reality itself seems to be bursting at the seams, so much so that "all prior history and logic felt to Jim Carrey like a garbled dream." Some readers might experience the garbled dreaminess of MEMOIRS AND MISINFORMATION as an annoyance, a fault. Which is unfortunate, because its subversion of history and logic is its greatest strength, especially as it serves to unmoor the individual self just enough to open it up to epiphany. In the end, Carrie, experiencing his own ultimate epiphany, smiles at the fact that "he'd ever thought he was a person at all. What a ludicrous delusion. What colossal labor. How exhausting, to be a self."

It certainly can be exhausting, being a self. But being a self while reading this book was downright exhilarating.