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Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry review – being Chandler Bing

The sitcom star’s fascinating, gruesome tale of addiction and how he kept the show on the road

When Matthew Perry was taking his first steps as an actor, his father bought him a book called Acting With Style. John Bennett Perry, a singer and performer best known for appearing in Old Spice adverts in the 1970s and 80s, wrote in the inside page: “Another generation shot to hell. Love, Dad.” Little did he know how accurate his inscription would turn out to be. Professionally, his son would easily outshine him, landing the part of Chandler Bing in Friends, the biggest sitcom in TV history. But, in life, it was Matthew who came off worse, a result of his catastrophic addictions to alcohol and opiates.

By turns fascinating and maddening, Perry’s memoir is less a tale of a glittering showbiz career than a fitfully gruesome account of his efforts to keep the show on the road. He reckons to have attended 6,000 AA meetings, detoxed 65 times, and spent in the region of $7m to get sober. His book begins, as so many addiction memoirs do, with him at his lowest ebb. Hospitalised after an “explosion” of the bowel, a result of chronic constipation caused by opiate abuse, he had arrived at the emergency room screaming in pain and then fallen into a coma which lasted for 14 days. “It’s kind of poetic,” he notes. “I was so full of shit it nearly killed me.”

The drily funny tone is typical of Perry, who read the early Friends scripts and saw a kindred spirit in the smart, withering Chandler. Realising in his teens he could use humour to get people’s attention, he turned being funny into an Olympic sport. With two school friends he developed a sarcastic way of talking – example: “Could the teacher be any meaner?” – which would later become his character’s signature.

His problems started well before he became a household name. A child of divorced parents, he had long felt like an outsider in his own family. From the age of five, he would travel alone by plane from Montreal to visit his father in Los Angeles wearing a sign that read “Unaccompanied minor”. At 14, he was delighted to discover that drinking quelled the negative thoughts and made him more charming too. Later on, a painkiller prescription brought fresh serenity and soon he was knocking back 55 pills a day.

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Perry’s addictive personality was also evident in his relentless quest for fame, which he believed would solve his problems: “I think you actually have to have all of your dreams come true to realise they are the wrong dreams,” he writes. The actor makes no bones about his atrocious behaviour, delivering scattergun apologies to family, colleagues and ex-girlfriends including Julia Roberts, whom he dumped purely out of fear that she would dump him first.

But if the many hospital visits, detox programmes and breakups have been chastening, the massive show-off in Perry hasn’t been entirely vanquished. He blithely refers to himself as one of the funniest guys on the planet, gets antsy about reviews and can’t stop talking about how rich he is (buying property seems to be another addiction). Elsewhere, he misjudges the mood with a gag in which he asks why “original thinkers” such as River Phoenix and Heath Ledger die while Keanu Reeves is still alive, and makes a tone-deaf pronouncement about a friend who “never made it as an actor, has diabetes, is constantly worried about money, doesn’t work. I would trade places with him in a second.”

It would be nice to report that Perry turned his life around and engineered a happy ending for his offscreen self. In fact, the most desolate moments come when he evaluates his life now, aged 53, “sitting in a huge house, overlooking the ocean, with no one to share it with, save a sober companion, a nurse, and a gardener twice a week”. Perry can undoubtedly be a pain in the backside but in Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing he wears his big, bruised heart on his sleeve. The overwhelming sense is of a lonely, disappointed man in desperate need of a hug.

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• Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible...

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir

Could this BE any more timely? Could this BE any sadder? Could he BE any more sorry about what he’s done to himself and others? The answer to these questions is NO, very much a NO.

Matthew Perry’s memoir, FRIENDS, LOVERS, AND THE BIG TERRIBLE THING, presents yet another chapter in one of the most popular television shows of all time. But he is very ready to address all of his personal demons in public. Perhaps by us knowing what has brought him to this point, he will feel seen and use our knowledge as a way to keep him on the straight and narrow path.

"Congratulations to [Matthew Perry] for being alive, first and foremost, and for writing a compelling, partly TMI book about one man’s battle against himself. Could there BE a more human story than that? I don’t think so."

There are plenty of memoirs in which celebrities tell you all about the behind-the-scenes horrors they have endured, but this book is different. Perry doesn’t really blame anyone but himself. And it’s a big deal to admit to everything one has done while masking pain in the giant world arena.

At a recent interview in Princeton, NJ, Perry looked wired but in a good way. He was sassy and spoke directly to the audience, echoing the sentiments put forth in his book: “I have an addictive personality, and now I can’t even be around drugs or alcohol.” He said he is pleased to be on the other side of this pain, but the people with whom he has burned bridges is a long and sad list.

Perry addresses his childhood, his attempts to be more like his father (the Old Spice guy from the ’80s), his brilliance at tennis (he was a junior champion in the US), his ability to keep the family peace as a people pleaser after his parents’ divorce, and his wandering into show business and the issues that arose when his dad, now remarried with a new family, grew jealous of him as “Friends” became a juggernaut.

He understands quite distinctly that his professional success did not make his personal shortcomings any easier, and the book is filled with the detritus of all the lost relationships with wonderful women (like Julia Roberts, Lizzy Caplan and Jamie Tarses, the latter of whom saved his life on more than one occasion) and the love he has fostered with his family. He is an AA advocate and has a newfound spirituality that gives him the strength to fight his addictions. This memoir is quite a journey.

There are a lot of details, physical ones, that make FRIENDS, LOVERS, AND THE BIG TERRIBLE THING feel a bit like a DARE notebook. It is a scared straight of sorts for those who think that addiction is not a disease (could they BE any more wrong?) This book could be handed to every kid who spent COVID lockdown watching “Friends” on repeat to remind them that drugs and alcohol never get rid of problems --- they only mask them.

Perry was part of a group of young actors, including Hank Azaria and Craig Bierko, who did not quite reach the heights that he did (although they have very successful careers), and how he became Chandler Bing is a story of fortune and destiny. He is more like the snarky, funny, vulnerable Chandler in person than he is in the book; in these pages he is forthright and funny at times, but angry and then resigned as his illness goes on.

To watch this handsome, talented man write so honestly about how his addiction and fears have turned him into a bachelor semi-recluse is a difficult read. As George Clooney once said, TV stars are like part of someone’s family: they are in your life like a family member, coming into your living room while you are resting in your underwear. We think of Chandler as someone we actually know. But Matthew Perry is a man, a survivor, an addict, a son, a friend --- a lot of things that FRIENDS, LOVERS, AND THE BIG TERRIBLE THING makes clear are now far more important to him than being an actor ever could be.

Congratulations to him for being alive, first and foremost, and for writing a compelling, partly TMI book about one man’s battle against himself. Could there BE a more human story than that? I don’t think so.

Reviewed by Jana Siciliano on November 21, 2022

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir by Matthew Perry

• Publication Date: June 25, 2024
• Genres: Memoir , Nonfiction
• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Flatiron Books
• ISBN-10: 1250866456
• ISBN-13: 9781250866455

Matthew Perry’s memoir – what the critics say

The Friends star’s bleak but witty autobiography is undeniably ‘fascinating’

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When Friends: The Reunion was broadcast last year, “all anybody could talk about was Matthew Perry”, said Eleanor Halls in The Daily Telegraph . It was clear that the man who “spent ten years cracking jokes in our living rooms”, as the “beloved” Friends character Chandler Bing, was in a very poor state: he had a bloated face, slurred speech, and “looked lonely and sad”.

Friends reunited for one-off special: ten best moments from the show Madly, Deeply by Alan Rickman: diary extracts packed with ‘profound’ observations

In his memoir, Perry, 53, explains what caused him to “appear so extinguished”. In his 20s, at the height of his fame, he became addicted to alcohol and opiates. He was soon taking 55 Vicodin pills a day, and “over the next 20 years, he would check into rehab 15 times, attend 6,000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and undergo 14 stomach surgeries”. He has nearly died on several occasions and says he has spent more than $9m treating his addictions. All this is recounted in Perry’s bleak but “witty” book, which is laced with his “trademark sarcasm and self-deprecation”.

Perry was born in Canada, the son of a “beauty queen and an American folk singer-turned-actor”, said Allison Stewart in The Washington Post . When he was nine months old, his father, a “functioning alcoholic who starred in Old Spice commercials”, walked out and moved to LA; and from the age of five, Perry would fly to visit him wearing a sign that read “unaccompanied minor”.

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Perry emerged into adulthood believing that only one thing could relieve his “feelings of loneliness and inadequacy”: becoming famous. But landing a role on the biggest TV sitcom in history wasn’t the cure-all he expected. “I think you actually have to have all of your dreams come true to realise they are the wrong dreams,” he notes.

This book begins, as most addiction memoirs do, with Perry at his “lowest ebb”, said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian . In 2019, he suffered an “explosion” of the bowel – a result of chronic constipation caused by opiate abuse – and spent nearly a year with a colostomy bag. “It was kind of poetic,” he writes. “I was so full of shit it nearly killed me.”

The experience prompted Perry to finally get clean, but even so, there is no “happy ending”: describing his life today, Perry writes of himself “sitting in a huge house, overlooking the ocean, with no one to share it with, save a sober companion, a nurse, and a gardener twice a week”. It’s a “maddening” book at times – Perry can be a “massive show-off” – but it’s undeniably “fascinating”. “The overwhelming sense is of a lonely, disappointed man in desperate need of a hug.”

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry

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Book details

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing

Author: Matthew Perry

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1 The View Nobody ever thinks that something really bad is going to happen to them. Until it does. And nobody comes back from a perforated bowel, aspiration pneumonia, and an ECMO machine. Until somebody did. Me. I’m writing this in a rented house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. (My real house is down the street being renovated—they say it will take six months, so I figure about a year.) A pair of red-tailed hawks is circling below me in the canyon that brings the Palisades down to the water. It’s a gorgeous spring day in Los Angeles. This morning I’ve been busy hanging art on my walls (or rather, having them hung—I’m not so handy). I’ve really gotten into art in the last few years, and if you look close enough, you’ll find the odd Banksy or two. I’m also working on the second draft of a screenplay. There’s fresh Diet Coke in my glass, and a full pack of Marlboros in my pocket. Sometimes, these things are enough. Sometimes. I keep coming back to this singular, inescapable fact: I am alive. Given the odds, those three words are more miraculous than you might imagine; to me, they have an odd, shiny quality, like rocks brought back from a distant planet. No one can quite believe it. It is very odd to live in a world where if you died, it would shock people but surprise no one. What those three words— I am alive —fill me with, above all else, is a sense of profound gratitude. When you’ve been as close to the celestial as I have, you don’t really have a choice about gratitude: it sits on your living room table like a coffee-table book—you barely notice it, but it’s there. Yet stalking that gratitude, buried deep somewhere in the faint-anise-distant-licorice of the Diet Coke, and filling my lungs like every drag of every cigarette, there’s a nagging agony. I can’t help but ask myself the overwhelming question: Why? Why am I alive? I have a hint to the answer, but it is not fully formed yet. It’s in the vicinity of helping people, I know that, but I don’t know how. The best thing about me, bar none, is that if a fellow alcoholic comes up to me and asks me if I can help them stop drinking, I can say yes, and actually follow up and do it. I can help a desperate man get sober. The answer to “Why am I alive?” I believe lives somewhere in there. After all, it’s the only thing I’ve found that truly feels good. It is undeniable that there is God there. But, you see, I can’t say yes to that question “Why?” when I feel like I’m not enough. You can’t give away something you do not have. And most of the time I have these nagging thoughts: I’m not enough, I don’t matter, I am too needy. These thoughts make me uncomfortable. I need love, but I don’t trust it. If I drop my game, my Chandler, and show you who I really am, you might notice me, but worse, you might notice me and leave me. And I can’t have that. I won’t survive that. Not anymore. It will turn me into a speck of dust and annihilate me. So, I will leave you first. I will fabricate in my mind that something went wrong with you, and I’ll believe it. And I’ll leave. But something can’t go wrong with all of them, Matso. What’s the common denominator here? And now these scars on my stomach. These broken love affairs. Leaving Rachel. (No not that one. The real Rachel. The ex-girlfriend of my dreams, Rachel.) They haunt me as I lie awake at 4:00 A.M., in my house with a view in the Pacific Palisades. I’m fifty-two. It’s not that cute anymore. * * * Every house I have ever lived in has had a view. That’s the most important thing to me. When I was five years old, I was sent on a plane from Montreal, Canada, where I lived with my mom, to Los Angeles, California, where I would visit my dad. I was what is called “an unaccompanied minor” (at one point that was the title of this book). It was typical to send kids on planes back then—flying children alone at that age was just something people did. It wasn’t right, but they did it. For maybe a millisecond I thought it would be an exciting adventure, and then I realized I was too young to be alone and this was all completely terrifying (and bullshit). One of you guys come pick me up! I was five. Is everybody crazy? The hundreds of thousands of dollars that particular choice cost me in therapy? May I get that back, please? You do get all sorts of perks when you’re an unaccompanied minor on a plane, including a little sign around your neck that reads UNACCOMPANIED MINOR, plus early boarding, kids-only lounges, snacks up the ying-yang, someone to escort you to the plane … maybe it should have been amazing (later, as a famous person, I got all these perks and more at airports, but every time it reminded me of that first flight, so I hated them). The flight attendants were supposed to look after me, but they were busy serving champagne in coach (that’s what they did in the anything-goes 1970s). The two-drink maximum had recently been done away with, so that flight felt like six hours in Sodom and Gomorrah. The stench of alcohol was everywhere; the guy next to me must have had ten old-fashioneds. (I stopped counting after a couple of hours.) I couldn’t imagine why any adult would want to drink the same drink over and over again … Ah, innocence. I pushed the little service button when I dared, which wasn’t very often. The flight attendants—in their 1970s hot boots and short-shorts—would come by, ruffle my hair, move on. I was fucking terrified. I tried to read my Highlights magazine, but every time the plane hit a bump in the air, I knew I was about to die. I had no one to tell me it was OK, no one to look at for reassurance. My feet didn’t even reach the floor. I was too scared to recline the seat and take a nap, so I just stayed awake, waiting for the next bump, wondering over and over what it would be like to fall thirty-five thousand feet. I didn’t fall, at least not literally. Eventually, the plane began its descent into the beautiful California evening. I could see the lights twinkling, streets splayed out like a great sparkling magic carpet, wide swathes of dark I now know were the hills, the city pulsing up toward me as I plastered my little face against the plane window, and I so vividly remember thinking that those lights, and all that beauty, meant I was about to have a parent. Not having a parent on that flight is one of the many things that led to a lifelong feeling of abandonment.… If I’d been enough, they wouldn’t have left me unaccompanied, right? Isn’t that how all this was supposed to work? The other kids had parents with them. I had a sign and a magazine. So that’s why when I buy a new house—and there have been many (never underestimate a geographic)—it has to have a view. I want the sense that I can look down on safety, on someplace where someone is thinking of me, at a place where love is. Down there, somewhere in that valley, or in that vast ocean out there beyond the Pacific Coast Highway, on the gleaming primaries of the red-tail’s wings, that’s where parenting is. That’s where love is. That’s where home is. I can feel safe now. Why was that little kid on a plane on his own? Maybe fly to Canada and fucking pick him up? That’s a question I often wonder about but would never dare to ask. I’m not the biggest fan of confrontation. I ask a lot of questions. Just not out loud. * * * For a long time, I tried to find just about anything and anybody to blame for the mess I kept finding myself in. I’ve spent a lot of my life in hospitals. Being in hospitals makes even the best of us self-pitying, and I’ve made a solid effort at self-pity. Each time I lie there, I find myself thinking back through the life I’ve lived, turning each moment of it this way and that, like a confusing find in an archaeological dig, trying to find some reason why I had spent so much of my life in discomfort and emotional pain. I always understood where the real pain was coming from. (I always knew why I was in physical pain at that moment—the answer was, well, you can’t drink that much, asshole .) For a start, I wanted to blame my loving, well-intentioned parents … loving, well-intentioned, and mesmerizingly attractive, to boot. Let’s go back to Friday, January 28, 1966—the scene is Waterloo Lutheran University in Ontario. We’re at the fifth annual Miss Canadian University Snow Queen competition (“judged on the basis of intelligence, participation in student activities, and personality as well as beauty”). Those Canadians spared no expense to herald a new Miss CUSQ; there was to be a “torchlight parade with floats, bands, and the contestants,” plus “an outdoor cookout and a hockey game.” The list of candidates for the honor includes one Suzanne Langford—she is listed eleventh and is representing the University of Toronto. Against her have been arrayed beauties with wonderful names like Ruth Shaver from British Columbia; Martha Quail from Ottawa; and even Helen “Chickie” Fuhrer from McGill, who had presumably added the “Chickie” to mitigate the fact that her surname was a tad unfortunate just two decades after the end of World War II. But these young women were no match for the beautiful Miss Langford. That freezing January evening the previous year’s winner helped crown the fifth Miss Canadian University Snow Queen, and with that honor came a sash and responsibility: it would now be Miss Langford’s job to hand over the crown the following year. The 1967 pageant was similarly exciting. This year there was to be a concert given by the Serendipity Singers, a Mamas & the Papas–kind of combo that just so happened to have a lead singer called John Bennett Perry. The Serendipity Singers were an anomaly even in the folk-heavy 1960s—their biggest (and only) hit, “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down,” was a rehash of a British nursery rhyme—even so, it reached number 2 on the adult contemporary list and number 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1964. But that achievement is somewhat put in perspective because the Beatles famously had the entire top five —“Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Twist and Shout,” “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “Please, Please Me.” No matter to John Perry—he was on the road, a working musician, getting to sing for his supper, and what could be better than having a gig at the Miss Canadian University Snow Queen gala in Ontario? There he was, happily singing, “Now this crooked little man and his crooked cat and mouse They all live together in a crooked little house,” and flirting across the microphone with last year’s Miss Canadian University Snow Queen, Suzanne Langford. At the time, they were two of the most gorgeous people on the face of the planet—you should see pictures of them from their wedding—you just want to punch them in their perfectly chiseled faces. They didn’t stand a chance. When two people look that good, they just kind of morph into each other. The flirting turned to dancing once John had finished his gig, and that might have been it, but for the massive, kismetic snowstorm that stalked the evening and made it impossible for the Serendipity Singers to get out of town. So, that’s the meet-cute: a folk singer and a beauty queen fall in love in a snowbound Canadian town in 1967 … best-looking man on the planet meets best-looking woman on the planet. Everyone there might as well have gone home. John Perry stayed the night, and Suzanne Langford was quite happy about that, and about a year or two later, after the montage scene, she found herself in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where John is from, and cells inside her were dividing and conquering. Maybe something in those simple divisions went awry, who can say—all I know is, addiction is an illness, and like my parents when they met, I didn’t stand a fucking chance. I was born on August 19, 1969, a Tuesday, the son of John Bennett Perry, late of the Serendipity Singers, and Suzanne Marie Langford, former Miss Canadian University Snow Queen. There was a huge storm the night I arrived (of course there was); everyone was playing Monopoly waiting for me to show up (of course they were). I hit the planet about a month after the Moon landing, and one day after Woodstock ended—so, somewhere between the cosmic perfection of the heavenly orbs, and all that shit down at Yasgur’s Farm, I became life, interrupting someone’s chance to build hotels on Boardwalk. I came out screaming, and I didn’t stop screaming. For weeks. I was a colicky kid—my stomach was a problem from the very start. My parents were being driven crazy by the amount I was crying. Crazy? Concerned, so they hauled me off to a doctor. This is 1969, a prehistoric time compared to now. That said, I don’t know how advanced civilization has to be to understand that giving phenobarbital to a baby who just entered his second month of breathing God’s air is, at best, an interesting approach to pediatric medicine. But it wasn’t that rare in the 1960s to slip the parents of a colicky child a major barbiturate. Some older doctors swore by it—and by it, I mean, “prescribing a major barbiturate for a child that’s barely born who won’t stop crying.” I want to be very clear on this point. I do NOT blame my parents for this. Your child is crying all the time, clearly something is wrong, the doctor prescribes a drug, he’s not the only doctor who thinks it’s a good idea, you give the drug to the child, the child stops crying. It was a different time. There I was, on the knee of my stressed mother, screaming over her twenty-one-year-old shoulder as some dinosaur in a white coat, barely looking up from his wide oak desk, tutted under his bad breath at “parents these days,” and wrote a script for a major addictive barbiturate. I was noisy and needy, and it was answered with a pill. (Hmm, that sounds like my fucking twenties.) I’m told I took phenobarbital during the second month of my life, between the ages of thirty and sixty days. This is an important time in a baby’s development, especially when it comes to sleeping. (Fifty years later I still don’t sleep well.) Once the barbiturate was on board, I would just conk out. Apparently, I’d be crying, and the drug would hit, and I’d be knocked out, and this would cause my father to erupt in laughter. He wasn’t being cruel; stoned babies are funny. There are baby pictures of me where you can tell I’m just completely fucking zonked, nodding like an addict at the age of seven weeks. Which is oddly appropriate for a kid born the day after Woodstock ended, I guess. I was being needy; I was not the cute smiling baby everyone was hoping for. I’ll just take this and shut the fuck up. Copyright © 2022 by Matthew Perry Foreword © 2022 by Lisa Kudrow

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INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER The BELOVED STAR OF FRIENDS takes us behind the scenes of the hit sitcom and his...

Book Details

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER The BELOVED STAR OF FRIENDS takes us behind the scenes of the hit sitcom and his struggles with addiction in this “CANDID, DARKLY FUNNY...POIGNANT” memoir ( The New York Times ) A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK by Time , Associated Press, Goodreads, USA Today , and more! “Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty.” So begins the riveting story of acclaimed actor Matthew Perry, taking us along on his journey from childhood ambition to fame to addiction and recovery in the aftermath of a life-threatening health scare. Before the frequent hospital visits and stints in rehab, there was five-year-old Matthew, who traveled from Montreal to Los Angeles, shuffling between his separated parents; fourteen-year-old Matthew, who was a nationally ranked tennis star in Canada; twenty-four-year-old Matthew, who nabbed a coveted role as a lead cast member on the talked-about pilot then called Friends Like Us . . . and so much more. In an extraordinary story that only he could tell—and in the heartfelt, hilarious, and warmly familiar way only he could tell it—Matthew Perry lays bare the fractured family that raised him (and also left him to his own devices), the desire for recognition that drove him to fame, and the void inside him that could not be filled even by his greatest dreams coming true. But he also details the peace he’s found in sobriety and how he feels about the ubiquity of Friends , sharing stories about his castmates and other stars he met along the way. Frank, self-aware, and with his trademark humor, Perry vividly depicts his lifelong battle with addiction and what fueled it despite seemingly having it all. Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is an unforgettable memoir that is both intimate and eye-opening—as well as a hand extended to anyone struggling with sobriety. Unflinchingly honest, moving, and uproariously funny, this is the book fans have been waiting for.

Imprint Publisher

Flatiron Books

9781250866448

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" R emarkable, startling, and heartfelt ...The bravery of Perry’s book is not just in what he says, or how he says it, and how unflinching he is in his commitment to say it, but that he chose to say it at all." — GQ “ Candid, darkly funny …starkly chronicling his decades-long cage match with drinking and drug use. Perry writes gratefully and glowingly… fans will find poignant nuggets in its pages .” — The New York Times “A heartbreakingly beautiful memoir.” — People " Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing is a raw, unflinching memoir that took courage to write. As it turns out, Matthew Perry has a lot of courage. He takes us through his addiction, his illness and his paralyzing loneliness. Somehow, during the course of his life, Matthew was able to turn his pain into comedic joy for others, but, he tells us, it was at a cost. Matthew takes us through his “hell” but doesn’t wallow. Ultimately, this book is filled with hope for the future. If you want to know about who Matthew Perry is, stay away from the rags and read this. " —Marta Kauffman, co-creator of the NBC sitcom Friends

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Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry, review: A bleak, exhausting addiction memoir

If you're looking for 90s nostalgia and behind-the-scenes gossip, more fool you. for a book about a life getting high, this is a collection only of lows.

In 1994, three weeks before he was cast as Chandler Bing in Friends , Matthew Perry prayed.

“God, you can do whatever you want to me. Just please make me famous.” The actor’s memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing , is the story of how God held up both sides of that bargain. It is an account of three decades of addiction, crippling pain, comas, an exploding colon, loneliness, self-hatred, self-sabotage, failed relationships, and expensive rehabs (it is also an account of the staggering expense of sobriety). Reading it is exactly as grim and as exhausting as all that sounds. For a book about a life getting high, this is a collection only of lows.

Matthew Perry grew up in Ottawa with his mother, who had high-profile jobs including as press secretary to prime minister Pierre Trudeau, and would travel unaccompanied to visit his father, an actor, in Los Angeles. He has had enough therapy to recognise that his problems might be rooted in that dysfunctional childhood and those long unsupervised journeys: the diffusion of tension by cracking wise, the fight for his mother’s attention one laugh at a time. (Perry acknowledges throughout his book the similarities between himself and Chandler.)

At 15, he moved to California to live with his father. There, drinking and fame presented themselves as solutions, things that could plug all the holes, fix him. The book follows his early twenties as a jobbing actor in the 90s, charming his way to his next gig, to his rise to the most famous man in the world on the biggest TV show in the world, dating Julia Roberts and firing golf balls out of Bruce Willis’s mansion in the Hollywood hills.

And it recounts all the times he was rushed to hospital and expected to die. It was written very recently, post-pandemic – Perry (now 53) sober and alone in a $20m, 20,000 square foot penthouse apartment with a stomach so scarred from overlapping surgeries that it looks like a topographical map of China.

Friends is what made and broke him, of course. Most people reading this will be fans of the show who know his character intimately (“if you’re going to be typecast, that’s the way to do it”). More fool you if you were hoping for 90s nostalgia and behind-the-scenes gossip: Perry might have been earning $1,100,000 per episode by the end but his desperate memories will not leave you keen to fire up the repeats.

All of his dreams had come true with this job but he couldn’t enjoy it unless he was high. Friends (like his life, and this book) hung precariously together between interventions and detoxes. “You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season – when I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills.” Monica and Chandler’s wedding? He was living in rehab at the time and had to be driven to and from set by his father.

But if he hadn’t got that part in a buzzy new sitcom originally called Friends Like Us – the one he knew should be his from the moment he read the first page of the script, the character whose very intonation felt like it had come from his own head (Chandler’s way of speaking would then go on, as Perry reminds us multiple times, to change the cadence of speech across America) – he would have “ended up on the streets of downtown LA shooting heroin in my arm until my untimely death”. (Heroin, by the way, has never been Perry’s drug of choice; he was too scared of that. He did pretty much everything else, though: OxyContin, Vicodin, at one period during filming of Friends he was on methadone, Xanax, cocaine, and a full quart of vodka every day.)

Perry says he always knew how lucky he was for Friends and the focus of his life became clinging onto it, even as he was “dying” in secret. He stayed sober on set, because “when you’re earning $1 million a week, you can’t afford to have the17th drink”. Much of this was out of a debt to his colleagues – supportive, concerned, talented, and mostly in the dark about just how serious this was; but he also suggests that not everybody wanted to admit the dire stakes.

“Everyone would ask me if I was all right, but nobody wanted to stop the Friends train because it was such a moneymaker, and I just felt horrible about it. My greatest joy was also my biggest nightmare – I was this close to messing up this wonderful thing.” He remembers the shame of his castmates covering for him: Matt LeBlanc jolting him awake when he dozed off on that Central Perk sofa; Jennifer Aniston confronting him in his trailer to tell him: “We can smell it.”

Every chapter of this book is interrupted by some vignette from a hospital or sober living facility (or the life-saving drive to one). It is as if Perry is jolting us between two worlds. One, the dizzying game of chance and fate that is Hollywood – Perry has spent the 18 years since Friends ended trying to be taken seriously as an actor and writer and he shares his experiences on other projects (including his leading part in Aaron Sorkin series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip , his flop West End, and Broadway play The End of Longing , his bids to have a film script made). The other world, that horrific loop of drinking and smoking and having his stomach ripped open that he has spent his life replaying.

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It isn’t enjoyable (or funny, and Perry is funny) to read and it is not in the least bit glamorous. The chronology is scattered, he repeats himself and his anecdotes, and he at times seems bitter, while at others self-effacing. He has been in Alcoholics Anonymous for decades and at points his narration reads a little as if he is standing at a meeting, sharing his story.

But he shares few of the highs – the fame was a poisoned chalice, the women he’d push away before they saw the “real him”, and he refers to his own obscene wealth constantly as if he himself is bored of it. Instead the greatest impression is of the tedium of the disease that he still says is going to kill him, and the mantras that he relies on to help bide his time until it does.

He is self-aware – he only blames himself for the hurt he has caused. “I bring along the problems and the darkness and the shit” – needy, lonely, desperately, desperately sorry to the women he has hurt (hundreds) and never married, and to himself for the children he never had. He is serious about getting other people sober, grateful that he is now, and still pious to the God to whom he made that Faustian prayer.

This is dark and miserable and Perry leaves you in no doubt when he says: “I would give it all up not to feel this way. I think about it all the time.”

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, by Matthew Perry, is published by Headline at £25

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Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, a review by Di

Flatiron Books November 1, 2022 250 pages

Goodreads | Bookshop.org | Amazon

It was recommended to me that I should read this book about a year ago. We have lost several close family members to addiction and it’s always been a struggle for the rest of us to understand. After Matthew Perry’s death last Saturday, I decided that it was time to read his book.

While the book is not terribly well written, it is from the heart. It is raw and emotional and honest. I don’t think Matthew Perry was hiding anything from the reader. What a shame that people live their lives with their bodies and minds in such turmoil and pain! And, honestly, I am surprised that he was able to live as long as he did. He painted quite an ugly picture of what life is like for an out-of-control addict.

One of the things that struck me was that he was willing and able to help other addicts. But he was not able to help himself.

I’m glad that he found a semblance of acceptance within himself during the last couple of years of his life. We’ll never know what the future might have held for him.

You brought so much joy to so many of us during your tenure as Chandler. Sleep softly, Matthew. May your mind and body remain at peace. ❤️

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Near-fatal ODs and love faxes to Julia Roberts: What Matthew Perry’s memoir reveals

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“Hi, I’m Chandler. I make jokes when I’m uncomfortable.”

“Until I was 25, I thought that the only response to ‘I love you’ was ‘Oh, crap!’”

Whether you’re a Gen-Xer who grew up with the stars of NBC’s Emmy-winning series “ Friends ” after its 1994 debut or a Zoomer who discovered the show in the streaming era, you can probably guess at the source of these dark witticisms: Could it BE anyone other than Chandler Bing?

What you’ll find out after reading actor Matthew Perry’s harrowing memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” is that such lines are also a case of art imitating life.

“I was Chandler,” Perry writes in his book, out Nov. 1, explaining that both he and his most famous character have used humor to compensate for their crippling fears, relationship anxieties and self-sabotaging behavior.

Where actor and character diverge is that Chandler finds happiness, marrying Monica Geller ( Courteney Cox ) and having twins; Perry, by contrast, only recently emerged from decades of intractable addiction, which culminated three years ago in a health crisis he was very lucky to survive.

Perry, 53, writes that he deeply regrets how his drug and alcohol abuse have cost him relationships. Now 18 months sober, he writes, he suffers from auditory hallucinations and will probably have to take Suboxone to treat opioid dependence for the rest of his life. This leaves him, he adds, in a consistent state of anhedonia: a reduced ability to feel pleasure.

‘Friends’ lack of diversity ‘embarrassed’ its co-creator. So she made a $4-million decision

After reckoning with her beloved sitcom’s legacy, Marta Kauffman pledged to support African and African American studies. And she’s not done yet.

June 29, 2022

With lines like “my mind is out to kill me, and I know it,” Perry opens a window into the mind of an addict, a place in which the struggle to get sober is a civil war and many battles are lost to relapse.

It’s cost him in every way. He writes that he spent more than $7 million trying to get sober. (Perry raised the estimate to $9 million in a recent interview .) His efforts included 15 stints in rehabilitation facilities and one in a mental institution; hypnosis sessions; 6,000 visits to AA and therapy twice a week for 30 years. While shooting an unused bit for Adam McKay’s 2021 film “ Don’t Look Up ,” he flew to a Swiss rehab and back on a private jet — $175,000 a pop.

Here’s what you’ll learn from his candid new memoir.

THE ONE THAT SCARED HIM MOSTLY STRAIGHT

Perry details several near-death experiences. On one occasion, his heart stopped beating for five minutes. Later, he was popping pills laced with fentanyl (and paying $3,000 for them several times a week).

“It is very odd to live in a world where if you died, it would shock people but surprise no one,” he writes.

But a 2019 incident was his closest call, he writes. He fell into a coma for 14 days after his colon burst. Doctors told his family members he had a 2% chance of survival. ‘I was so full of s— it almost killed me,” he writes. It turned out to be a life-saving wake-up call. Today, the thought of needing a colostomy bag for life keeps him from using, coupled with the fact that alcohol and opiates “simply don’t work for me anymore”: Even on 1,800 milligrams of opiates a day, he could no longer get high.

THE ONES WHO GOT AWAY

Perry writes that at age 19 he fell in love with Valerie Bertinelli on the set of “Sydney.” According to him, they shared “an elaborate makeout session” while Bertinelli’s husband, rock star Eddie Van Halen, was passed out a few feet away. He also writes that he made out with Gwyneth Paltrow inside a closet. Neither of these dalliances went very far.

One relationship still haunts him to this day. He was together with Rachel Dunn, a woman he met upon crashing her 23rd birthday party, for six years and almost asked her to marry him, but chickened out. “All my fears reared up like a snake,” he writes. “I often think if I’d asked, now we’d have two kids and a house. Instead, I’m some schmuck who’s alone in his house at fifty-three.”

He also shares an account of a lost love that “still hurts” — someone he met on a film set in 1999. He fell hard but she ultimately rejected him, making it clear that “my drinking was a problem.” Perry does not name the woman, though he did star alongside Neve Campbell in 1999’s “Three to Tango.”

More than 20 years later, Perry bought a ring and proposed to a woman while at a Switzerland rehab. But he was high on hydrocodone and later forgot the whole thing. It was months after his coma — still undergoing surgeries and still struggling to get clean. He was “desperate” and “didn’t want to be this injured and alone” during the peak of the COVID pandemic. Perry doesn’t name her, but last year People reported on a broken engagement with literary manager Molly Hurwitz.

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THE ONE WITH JULIA ROBERTS

When Julia Roberts only agreed to appear on “Friends” if she could be in Chandler’s storyline, showrunner Marta Kauffman encouraged Perry to send the actress flowers. That kicked off a romance between the two, according to Perry — beginning with the (so very 1990s) exchange of flirty messages over fax machines. They were already a couple by the time they began filming.

But like the vast majority of Perry’s relationships, it ended when he felt he was letting his guard down, reigniting a lifelong fear of abandonment. Perry traces these issues in part to his father leaving the family when Matthew was a baby and his mother was 21.

“If I drop my game, my Chandler, and show you who I really am,” he writes, “you might notice me, but worse, you might notice me and leave me.”

THE ONE WITH JENNIFER ANISTON

Years before they were both cast in “Friends,” Perry asked Jennifer Aniston out. She declined, but he would continue to “crush badly” for her.

THE ONE WITH THE CASTING GOSSIP

Perry writes that one of his best friends, Hank Azaria of “The Simpsons” fame, auditioned to play Joey twice. When Matt LeBlanc scored the part, Perry was initially “a little jealous” of his “leading-man looks.”

Another close friend, Craig Bierko, a former co-star on “Sydney,” was first offered the part of Chandler, according to Perry, but turned it down. After Perry was cast and the show became an immediate hit, he says he and Bierko didn’t speak for two years.

Landing the part of Chandler saved Perry’s life, he writes. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been “out of the realms of possibility” for him to have “ended up on the streets of Downtown L.A. shooting heroin.” He writes that heroin was a line he was terrified to cross. “It is because of that fear that I am still alive today.”

THE ONE WITH THE BACKSTAGE DRAMA

Perry points out that you can tell how and what he was using throughout the various “Friends” seasons. First, he dropped 10 pounds of “alcohol fat” between the pilot and the first episode. His weight fluctuated between 128 and 225 pounds while making the show. If he was carrying weight, it was alcohol abuse. If he was thin, it was pills. If he had a goatee it was “lots of pills.” By the end of Season 3, he spent most of his time trying to obtain Vicodin — 55 pills a day. Sometimes he’d go to open houses just to steal some from medicine cabinets.

Although he asserts he was never high while filming “Friends,” he’d often be sick or hungover. Once, Perry passed out on the Central Perk couch and LeBlanc had to nudge him awake to say his line. Later, Aniston called him out for drinking again, telling him, “We can smell it.” Season 9 was the only year he was “completely sober.”

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May 26, 2021

THE ONE WHERE THINGS GOT WORSE

Even before “Friends” wrapped in 2004, addiction was already exacting a toll on Perry’s post-TV career. Perry writes that around March 2001, while filming “Serving Sara” (2002), he was on methadone, Xanax and cocaine and drinking a full quart of vodka a day. He showed up to film a scene, only to realize it had been shot a few days earlier. He shut down the film’s production (and postponed his “Friends” scenes) so he could go to a Marina del Rey detox center. He was living in a rehab facility in Malibu when Chandler and Monica tied the knot. As for “Serving Sara,” he says producers later billed him $650,000 for the breach and dragged him into postproduction to dub over his slurred lines.

Again in rehab around November 2020, his heart stopped after doctors administered propofol that interacted with the hydrocodone in his system. Paramedics saved his life with CPR but broke eight ribs in the process, ultimately costing him scenes with Meryl Streep in “Don’t Look Up.” (Just before the incident he was able to shoot a scene with Jonah Hill , but his scenes were cut from the finished film.)

In recent years, Perry’s front teeth fell out while he was biting into a piece of toast. He removed and replaced all his pearly whites.

THE ONE WITH THE FISTICUFFS

Perry beat up Justin Trudeau when they were kids — well before the latter became Canada’s prime minister. Perry’s Canadian mother was the press secretary for Justin’s father, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and little Matthew resented the time she spent at work.

Years later, he was set up on a date with Cameron Diaz after she stopped seeing Justin Timberlake. Diaz got immediately stoned and accidentally punched Perry in the face, he writes.

Also, he accidentally hit his own idol, Chevy Chase, in the balls.

THE ONE WITH HOPE

Perry has been “mostly sober” since 2001, “save for about sixty or seventy little mishaps.” He would give up his fame and wealth in a heartbeat to “not have a brain that wants [him] dead.” But he’s slowly “acquiring a taste for reality” and is determined to figure out his purpose.

“There is a reason I’m still here. And figuring out why is the task that has been put in front of me.”

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A long-awaited reunion, after more than a year of racial reckoning, offered ‘Friends’ a chance to own up to its past failings. It didn’t take it.

May 27, 2021

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May 29, 2024

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FRIENDS, LOVERS, AND THE BIG TERRIBLE THING

by Matthew Perry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2022

Strictly for Perry’s fans.

The TV star details his career and his major addiction issues.

"I don't think it's an exaggeration to suggest that Chandler Bing transformed the way America spoke," writes Perry of his character on the megahit sitcom Friends , who habitually emphasized a different word in a sentence than one might expect. Could this be any bigger of a deal? Apparently not. "Aaron [Sorkin] and Tommy [Schlamme] had changed the way America looked at serialized TV with The West Wing , and I had changed how America spoke English,” writes the author. Certainly, plenty of readers will be interested in Perry's fabulous wealth and extraordinary fame—at one point in his life, he was one of the "most famous people in the world—in fact, I was being burned by the white-hot flame of fame”—his unsuccessful relationships with women, his 15 trips to rehab (“I have spent upward of $7 million to get sober”), numerous surgeries for the ravages of opioid-induced constipation, and his inability to add anything significant to his resume after Friends . However, Perry is a blurter, not a storyteller, and no ghostwriter or collaborator was involved in this project. Though he asserts that he does not blame his parents for his difficulties, the author sticks a major pin in the day they sent him on an airplane as an unaccompanied minor when he was 5 years old. Some will find it hard to sympathize with this story, and further mean-spirited outbursts don’t help—e.g., "Why is it that original thinkers like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger died, but Keanu Reeves still walks among us?" The concluding chapters trail off into what could be notes for some future acceptance speech. "I am me," he writes. "And that should be enough, it always has been enough." It’s not enough to carry this memoir.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022

ISBN: 9781250866448

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY

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SEEN & HEARD

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton

LOVE, PAMELA

by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that ." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy , which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir Paperback – June 25, 2024

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER The BELOVED STAR OF FRIENDS takes us behind the scenes of the hit sitcom and his struggles with addiction in this “CANDID, DARKLY FUNNY...POIGNANT” memoir ( The New York Times ) A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK by Time , Associated Press, Goodreads, USA Today , and more! “Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty.” So begins the riveting story of acclaimed actor Matthew Perry, taking us along on his journey from childhood ambition to fame to addiction and recovery in the aftermath of a life-threatening health scare. Before the frequent hospital visits and stints in rehab, there was five-year-old Matthew, who traveled from Montreal to Los Angeles, shuffling between his separated parents; fourteen-year-old Matthew, who was a nationally ranked tennis star in Canada; twenty-four-year-old Matthew, who nabbed a coveted role as a lead cast member on the talked-about pilot then called Friends Like Us . . . and so much more. In an extraordinary story that only he could tell―and in the heartfelt, hilarious, and warmly familiar way only he could tell it―Matthew Perry lays bare the fractured family that raised him (and also left him to his own devices), the desire for recognition that drove him to fame, and the void inside him that could not be filled even by his greatest dreams coming true. But he also details the peace he’s found in sobriety and how he feels about the ubiquity of Friends , sharing stories about his castmates and other stars he met along the way. Frank, self-aware, and with his trademark humor, Perry vividly depicts his lifelong battle with addiction and what fueled it despite seemingly having it all. Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is an unforgettable memoir that is both intimate and eye-opening―as well as a hand extended to anyone struggling with sobriety. Unflinchingly honest, moving, and uproariously funny, this is the book fans have been waiting for.

• Print length 272 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Flatiron Books
• Publication date June 25, 2024
• Dimensions 5.35 x 0.75 x 8.15 inches
• ISBN-10 1250866456
• ISBN-13 978-1250866455
• See all details

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" R emarkable, startling, and heartfelt ...The bravery of Perry’s book is not just in what he says, or how he says it, and how unflinching he is in his commitment to say it, but that he chose to say it at all." ― GQ “ Candid, darkly funny …starkly chronicling his decades-long cage match with drinking and drug use. Perry writes gratefully and glowingly… fans will find poignant nuggets in its pages .” ― The New York Times “A heartbreakingly beautiful memoir.” ― People " Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing is a raw, unflinching memoir that took courage to write. As it turns out, Matthew Perry has a lot of courage. He takes us through his addiction, his illness and his paralyzing loneliness. Somehow, during the course of his life, Matthew was able to turn his pain into comedic joy for others, but, he tells us, it was at a cost. Matthew takes us through his “hell” but doesn’t wallow. Ultimately, this book is filled with hope for the future. If you want to know about who Matthew Perry is, stay away from the rags and read this. " ―Marta Kauffman, co-creator of the NBC sitcom Friends

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Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Flatiron Books (June 25, 2024)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250866456
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250866455
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.35 x 0.75 x 8.15 inches
• #12 in Television Performer Biographies
• #38 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies
• #112 in Memoirs (Books)

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Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry book review

I’ve always been a massive fan of Friends , it is without a doubt one of my favourite shows of all time and I’ll put it on almost any time of the day. When I saw Matthew Perry had released a memoir, I was very keen to read who the real Chandler was. I knew about his addiction but only on a very surface level “Ooh, did you know Chandler was apparently addicted to drugs during his time on Friends ” sort of level but wasn’t aware of the horrible and harrowing depths to which the addiction took over his life.

Please note that this article contains affiliate links. This means that if you choose to purchase any products via the links below, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. These affiliate links do not affect my final opinion of the product.

Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing tells Matthew Perry’s memoir, focusing on his incredible ongoing and relentless battle with addictions to drugs and alcohol. If you’re a fan of Friends then I will warn you that this may change the way you look at the show forever. In short: despite the humour and joy the show produces, Perry is struggling with staying alive behind the scenes and it begins to get into his work.

Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing plot – 4.5/5

So this is a memoir so the review of the plot isn’t based on what the writer has created and how well it has all come together, but more my simple reaction to the incredible stories and overall tale that Perry has chosen to tell.

In Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing Perry starts you from the very beginning of his life, talking about his parents and his opinions on how they parented him, how he grew up using humour as a way of covering up any insecurities, how when he first got drunk instead of throwing up or feeling fear like his friends, he felt true bliss for the very first time. It’s all very harrowing with a lot of explanations (though crucially never excuses) as to where he thinks the addiction make have sourced from.

He talks about his time in Friends , his struggle with balancing his addiction with relationships and his professional life. He discusses how despite being good-looking, ridiculously wealthy and very successful, nothing could help his addiction.

The whole book is very dark. There are moments where he discusses nearly dying and some very troubling moments in his life. I commend Perry for not pulling any punches here and being brutal and honest about all of the horrible moments he faced. I don’t want to spoil the book too much as there’s so much to digest in here which will leave you feeling quite sorry for Perry but also so proud (he’s technically been sober since 2001 but has recently said that he’s now properly sober).

One other thing I must mention is that this book, despite being about a very dark matter still manages to slip in some humour. If you’re not someone who can take a darker joke, this may not be the book for you.

Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing characters – 4/5

How does one rate the characters from a memoir? Well I think the best place to start is the personality and opinions that Matthew Perry himself gives across. When I went into this book, I heard he had come out as a bit of an ass. However, this is likely again from those with fairly weak walls. As I mentioned in the paragraph above, if you can’t take a joke, then yes you’ll likely take offence with some of the things in this list (though I can tell you now, none of it is aimed at you.)

Perry praises almost everyone he’s worked with, including his Friends costars who you’d think after working with them for ten years he’d have some bad things to say about, but he simply doesn’t/

The vibe he gives off is that he’s actually a very nice guy who has grown an ego based on being one of the most popular names in America for a few years and having earned a hideous amount of money. Also, for a while, he was considered incredibly really good-looking and could literally get any woman he wanted. With all of this, he’s grown an ego that you have to argue many would struggle to contain.

However, despite his willingness to accept these aspects of his life, he never forgets to remember how very low he was or how mean he was to certain people when high or drunk. He talks of it as a disease that ate away at him and controlled the way he lived his life for way too long – making you feel sorry for him!

Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing final rating – 4.5

Matthew Perry’s memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing was an incredibly powerful tale of a man who, to everyone’s untrained eye had everything: money, good looks, fame, popularity, the women, the house, the cars, the career. But behind that, away from the public, the limelight and the cameras he was struggling with one of the most all-encompassing diseases somebody with an able body could suffer from – an addiction.

If you’re a fan of Friends , I’d go into this book with caution as you may never be able to watch it without thinking of Chandler differently. However, in the same breath, I’d wholeheartedly recommend reading Perry’s story. It’s real, it’s brutal and it is emotional – everything you want the memoir of one of the most famous men on TV to be.

Pick up a copy of Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing from Amazon here.

If you liked this book then you may like my reviews of the following books:

• This is Going To Hurt by Adam Kay

2 thoughts on “ Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry book review ”

This is a great review Luke, I’ve been umminng and ahhing about reading this since it was released- Friends fan. Like you, I only know the surface level details about his addiction, sounds like a powerful read.

Thanks Sarah. Yeah, it’s very eye-opening and very sad, both of which made it a fascinating read!

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I don't know if I can finish Matthew Perry's memoir

Has anyone read it and does the tone shift beyond the first 50 pages? So far, it comes off like he's writing with the voice of his false self with no awareness of that and no attempt to delve beyond the obvious "oh yeah I'm one screwed up guy." I don't even know what possessed me to buy this as I'm not a fan of his. I guess I was hoping for something insightful from someone who has been through a lot of ups and downs in life and had unique experiences. Instead, it just seems like a big self-pity-fest and humblebrag, sometimes an outright brag, with a bit of class clown thrown in. He sounds like an arrested adolescent. Like he has to mention his $20 million penthouse and he is constantly complaining about his parents then saying, "oh but my dad is my hero." The timelines don't add up either, it's a bit confusing and makes me skeptical about the accuracy of some of the things he's claiming.

Watch CBS News

Criminal charges possible in death of Matthew Perry: Report

By Danielle Radin

June 26, 2024 / 9:21 PM PDT / KCAL News

New reports Wednesday say that criminal charges could be recommended in connection with the death of actor Matthew Perry.  The Los Angeles Times reported investigators have linked several people to how Perry obtained the drug Ketamine, which was found in his system. 

The beloved "Friends" actor was found unresponsive in his pool on  Oct. 28 , "floating face down in the heated end," the report states. He was 54. 

In December,  the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's Office  released an autopsy report  attributing his passing to an overdose of ketamine. Contributing factors included drowning, coronary artery disease, and the presence of buprenorphine, a medication used to treat opioid addiction. 

Perry was reportedly being treated with Ketamine for depression, but had not had an infusion by a medical professional in more than a week before his death. KCAL talked to an emergency room doctor familiar with how ketamine can impact patients. 

"It needs to be used under doctor supervision," said Dr. Angelique Campen. "It has to be with a cardiac monitor and oxygen monitor and under the care and supervision of a doctor. When I use ketamine in the emergency department, I use it as a dissociative agent, like if I'm doing a painful procedure on someone." 

The new report said that investigators are getting closer to discovering where Perry got the Ketamine found in his system at the time of his death.

Danielle Radin is a journalist for CBS Los Angeles and has authored 9 books. She is originally from Hermosa Beach. Danielle covers breaking news, crime, tech and politics.

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Two Sisters, Joined in Hardship and Separated by a Bear

A massive, mysterious grizzly takes on symbolic weight in Julia Phillips’s moody and affecting second novel.

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By Jess Walter

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BEAR, by Julia Phillips

In 2019, a black bear swam out to the San Juan Islands, the lush, lovely archipelago in Washington’s north Puget Sound. The adult male was spotted on six islands before moving on, apparently discouraged by the paucity of mates (or perhaps by the high price of real estate). More than a year later, when I visited the San Juans, the bear was still the talk of the float plane.

Such a rare occurrence is the launching point for Julia Phillips’s second novel, “Bear,” the moody and affecting follow-up to her best-selling debut, the 2019 National Book Award finalist “Disappearing Earth.” That book, which began with the abduction of two sisters, created deep pools of pathos and suspense by spreading its narrative over a range of characters in the girls’ remote home, the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia.

In “Bear,” Phillips has found another evocative setting, San Juan Island, on which to craft another story of hard-luck sisters, this time the 20-somethings Sam and Elena, who live with their dying 51-year-old mother in a “1979 vinyl-sided nightmare” surrounded by swanky summer homes.

But the symphonic narration of “Disappearing Earth” has given way here to a soloist. “Bear” is told through the close third-person point of view of the younger sister, Sam, who bitterly toils away inside a ferry for $24 an hour, selling coffee and snacks to “people who treated her like a peasant.” One day, Sam wanders on deck, looks down at the water and sees something remarkable. “A shape broke the surface. A creature. Moving.”

It’s a marvelous opening, but riding shotgun for the next 270 sparely written pages with such a brittle protagonist proves wearying. Sam suffers her dead-end job, her mother’s illness, her class anger and her slim prospects. (“How exhausting. This slog. Endless.”) She distrusts anyone who tries to help her: friendly neighbor, attractive wildlife expert, even her seemingly attentive lover. “It wasn’t fair that Ben should move around, rent his own place, go fishing when he felt like it,” Phillips writes. “It enraged her.”

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