Friends, Lovers and the Big, Terrible Thing

Matthew Perry's memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing was a birthday present. I've been wanting to read it ever since Perry's shock death in October last year. Insecure, witty Chandler Bing was my favourite Friends character; Chandler and Monica's romance unfolded in parallel with my own courtship with my husband, and I followed it avidly. I was dimly aware that Perry had suffered from a painkiller addiction during one season of Friends, (one season? Huh!) but I stupidly assumed that he had gone to rehab and got over it. How wrong I was.

Friends, Lovers is a painful read. Perry started drinking at eleven, moved on to opiates (though he always balked at heroin) and ketamine, and never broke free from addiction to one substance or another for longer than a year or so until the day he died. He tells how, as a colicky baby, a doctor prescribed phenobarbitol to stop him crying; was that when his brain chemistry was irretrievably altered? Or was his deep anxiety the source of the black hole inside he was never able to fill, not with gorgeous girlfriends, not with fame, not with money or artistic success? 

The tragedy of Matthew Perry is that he was never able to convince himself that he was enough. Plenty of people tried to help him; he made numerous attempts to help himself, and sometimes he would seem to succeed in shaking off his demons. But never for long. There was a particular anguish in reading the end of the book, where he declares that he's clean for good this time, knowing full well that he would be dead within a year. It's hard to escape the conclusion that his sad, premature ending was inevitable. Perhaps the saddest part is that he really was just as smart, funny and surrounded by love as Chandler; yet as Perry himself points out, Chandler was able to mature and achieve the goals that Matthew Perry the actor never could.