Jim Carrey faces death, family pain and a bloodthirsty Gwyneth Paltrow in apocalyptic novel

It was a typical Saturday on the shores of Hawaii when Jim Carrey learned he had 10 minutes to live.

An emergency alert had been sent to the state's residents saying a ballistic missile was on its way and everyone was to seek immediate shelter.

The 2018 message was an error, the result of an employee hitting the wrong button, but there was no way for the Golden Globe-winning star to know that as his assistant tearfully explained over FaceTime that they were done for.

“She was crying and she was saying, 'Chief, the missiles are coming. It's real, and we have 10 minutes before they hit from North Korea,’” Carrey told USA TODAY. “We had no idea that it was a false missile alert, so to us, it was happening.”

It was during this call when his assistant, in her panic, hit a wrong button herself, capturing a screenshot of Carrey’s face as he learned of his impending doom. Rather than have the image erased, Carrey found a better use for it – on the cover of his new book.

“That cover is somebody staring at infinity, staring at eternity,” Carrey said. “And it wasn't panic. It was more the feeling of, 'Wow, that's weird. Huh. That's how it's gonna end? Strange.’”

According to the actor, it’s a fitting image to greet readers as they pick up a copy of his novel out Tuesday, “Memoirs and Misinformation.” Co-written with Brooklyn-based writer Dana Vachon, the fictionalized autobiography follows Carrey as he grapples with the confines of fame, his sense of self and an alien apocalypse. Throw in a Mao Zedong biopic, a bloodthirsty Gwyneth Paltrow and a star-studded Hungry Hungry Hippos film, and you have a Hollywood-sized end-of-the-world epic.

The book is eight years in the making, said the authors, who first met while discussing one of Carrey’s paintings. As they talked over the years, the pals realized they shared a habit of streaming apocrypha and scenes from early human history in wee morning hours. According to Vachon, conversations between the two writers laid the groundwork for “Memoirs and Misinformation,” which opens with a bearded and bleary-eyed Carrey streaming the destruction of Pompeii from his high-tech Los Angeles home in the middle of the night.

5 books not to miss: Jim Carrey's wild debut novel, Charlie Kaufman's 'Antkind'

Though the novel centers on Carrey, it doesn’t offer behind-the-scenes secrets from “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” or gossip from the Golden Globes. Rather, the book follows Carrey through a series of wacky fictional circumstances that expose his inner life.

According to Carrey, he and Vachon were not interested in writing a factual memoir.

“Someone else can do that someday,” Carrey said. “But we’re on a creative journey. We want to create characters, and we want to have fun with personalities.”

Vachon said theirs isn’t the only autobiography to play fast and loose with the truth.

“We felt like the genre of the celebrity memoir was so shot through with lies of omission and manipulation to the reader that at the end of reading most of these things, you are a candidate for a refund,” Vachon said. “So we thought, ‘Well, actually, what if we were to take that liberty?’”

One liberty the duo takes is in their portrayals of celebrities, such as Anthony Hopkins, Kanye West and Kelsey Grammer. Paltrow gets a particularly vivid rendering as a new age-wellness proponent who, through guided meditation, discovers an insatiable appetite for death. In the face of the apocalypse, the warrior Paltrow advocates for a world “filled with so much joy your only concern is laugh lines, maybe a little neck work.”

“That’s a funny line because it's actually Gwyneth,” Vachon said. “You're actually looking at the Goop proprietor there, but everything around that is the hard opposite, which is a Viking berserker who rejoices in combat.”

Carrey added it's always fun to work against type.

“She seems so proper that it's just like Jimmy Stewart saying dirty words, you know?” Carrey continued. "There's gotta be a little mercenary in her, you know what I mean? If she's gonna be the CEO of a big company."

Nicolas Cage gave Carrey a rave review of the book, which portrays the “National Treasure” star as a man with an affinity for semi-naked jiujitsu and given to prophetic visions of saber-toothed tigers.

“I was very nervous about what he'd say, and he was just like, 'Oh, man, I'm so honored. You have no idea,’” Carrey said, dropping his voice to Cage’s register. “And then he read the book, and he said, 'Melville, would've loved this book! Heinlein would've loved this book!’”

Mixed with the fiction is some reality, said Carrey, who added that passages about his parents and upbringing are “very real.” At one point in the novel, Carrey dreams of his past working as a janitor after his father lost an accounting job he'd held for 30 years.

“All of it is so valuable to me now it's unbelievable, but at the time, it made me mad,” Carrey said. “I was angry at the world for hurting my father. I blamed the world for disappointing him and breaking his heart.”

Another real worry represented in Carrey’s book involves the pressures of fame. In one passage, Carrey, after seeing images of John Lennon’s corpse online, makes himself up before bed so his dead body would be fit for the public eye, should he perish in his sleep.

Jim Carrey says he ignored warnings about polarizing political artwork

“That's a very weird thing to know about yourself,” Carrey said. “That when I die, someone is going to take a picture on the operating table and sell it.”

But Carrey is no stranger to confronting death.

As the actor faced what he thought were the last 10 minutes of his life in Hawaii, he didn’t drive away. He didn’t hide. Instead, he sat on the lanai, looked out at the ocean and reflected on all he was grateful for.

“By the time two minutes left came, I was in a state of grace, and I felt very satisfied about what I brought to the world and who I was and all of the gifts that I had been given,” he said. “I felt extremely lucky.”

Then, seconds before the end of the world, Carrey’s co-author called with news: It was a false alarm.

Though this apocalypse was also a fiction, Carrey said it imbued him with something real: a peace of mind he hopes to impart to readers as they turn the final page.

“I hope that we end the world for them, if just for a moment, in a really peaceful, beautiful way,” he said. “That they get a taste of that moment that I had when I stopped grasping at things and I started looking at the glorious nature of this creation and what we've been given. I hope that they have a palpable feeling of that freedom.”

The authors will discuss "Memoirs and Misinformation" with Mitchell Kaplan and an introduction by Judy Blume for the virtual, ticketed event "An Evening with Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon" Thursday at 9 p.m. EDT.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Jim Carrey talks painful upbringing in celeb-filled apocalypse novel