friends lovers and the big terrible thing book review

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.įriends is what made and broke him, of course. 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.Īnd it recounts all the times he was rushed to hospital and expected to die. There, drinking and fame presented themselves as solutions, things that could plug all the holes, fix him. (Perry acknowledges throughout his book the similarities between himself and Chandler.)Īt 15, he moved to California to live with his father. 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. 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.

For a book about a life getting high, this is a collection only of lows. Reading it is exactly as grim and as exhausting as all that sounds. 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). 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. “God, you can do whatever you want to me. In 1994, three weeks before he was cast as Chandler Bing in Friends, Matthew Perry prayed.

Friends lovers and the big terrible thing book review