Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry review – being Chandler Bing
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.
The actor makes no bones about his atrocious behaviour, delivering apologies to family, colleagues and ex-girlfriends
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.
• Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry is published by Headline (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
