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

I am a fan of Friends and Perry. Getting to know more about his life has taught me more about the actor, the man, but also helped me reflect on my life as well, at different levels, but the book is written in such a simple way that it was easy for me to draw parallels with my own person/life.
The book made me go through all sorts of emotions and this is how I define a good book.

I’ll admit, I rarely watched “Friends” when episodes first aired. My wife started binge watching it a couple years ago or so, probably during the pandemic, and so I started watching it with her. I do think that I was a little too hard on the show though as I always thought that it was a bit of a “Seinfeld” “rip-off.” In reality there are enough differences in the shows that now, after watching the entire series of each, I’ve relaxed my criticism. A bit.

And I rarely read autobiographies, or what people usually call “memoirs” nowadays. I usually am reading true-crime books, in particular those about serial killers. I did read “C’mon, Get Happy: Fear and Loathing on the Partridge Family Bus” (CGH) from David Cassidy in 2021 and I actually liked Mr. Cassidy LESS after reading his memoir. I kind of wish I wouldn’t have read CGH and just remembered him instead from his time on the show. It’s just that I found Mr. Cassidy to be a bit of a braggart while reading and while I finished CGH I was struggling to even care towards the end. I’m guessing that Susan Dey felt the same. Ahem.

Now, rarely does Matthew Perry “brag” during “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir” (FLB) about himself. He does discuss how much money he made during filming of “Friends,” and I don’t have a problem with that, mostly because he discusses how David Schwimmer actually was instrumental in negotiating a great deal for the entire cast and not just for Mr. Schwimmer. In reality Mr. Perry is far more self-deprecating in FLB than Mr. Cassidy is in CGH. Mr. Perry doesn’t seem to hide much when it comes to his struggles with addiction and if he does underplay it, well, he must be REALLY bad. Mr. Perry discusses how he was taking up to 55 pain killers a day and that is extreme. For those who don’t know, pain killers tend to dry you out and slow down digestion so I have no idea how someone could take that many for any length of time and survive.

Well, Mr. Perry almost didn’t survive.

Mr. Perry was rushed by a friend from one of his many stints in rehab to the hospital and the people running the rehab facility tried to stop him. If they had been successful Mr. Perry surely would’ve died. Heck, he still should’ve died in the hospital even though he had probably the best care that money could buy. From memory he said that only “two percent of people survive on the machine required to keep him alive,” and I think he also called it a “Hail Mary.”

Overall I really liked FLB and I actually read it in one day. As a matter of fact I couldn’t sleep last night and kept picking up my Kindle device and would continue reading. Usually readers might say, “I couldn’t put it down!” but I might say, “I couldn’t leave it down.” Over and over I picked up my device, opened the Kindle app, and continued from my last bookmark. Luckily for me Kindle apps save the bookmark for me and that’s only one of the reasons I tend to almost only read digital. I will buy a paperback or a hardcover version but only if I MUST read a book and there is no digital version.

But still FLB is not a “perfect book,” far from it. Towards the end I think that Mr. Perry starts to repeat himself and I got the feeling that he was on a tight deadline and just hammered out the last few chapters. I don’t know if he first created an outline — I think that all authors should do so at an early phase in writing — but I think a good outline would’ve really helped create a more polished effort. It’s also the case that Mr. Perry has a tendency to use too many parentheticals and that becomes a bit of a distraction for the reader.

Not that it bothers me but it might bother some readers: Mr. Perry does discuss religion, or at least God, quite a bit towards the end. If religion is a turnoff, I think that FLB may not be for you. Mr. Perry does seem to think that God helped keep him alive, maybe even helped him break some addictions, and that is fine by me. I can’t prove it either way, and it is Mr. Perry’s memoir, so he has a right to think and write whatever he chooses. Personally, I appreciate his honesty.

Mr. Perry does admit going into open houses and swiping pain meds from home sellers and that reminded me a lot of Ryan Leaf. I think that Mr. Leaf used to do the same thing and it got that ex-NFL player quite a few years in prison for it. From a legal standpoint if I were Mr. Perry, and I were writing a memoir, I think I might not have disclosed this. I am not a lawyer and I don’t know what legal troubles it could cause him now.

There has been quite a bit of noise about how Mr. Perry tends to “kiss and tell” and I think that’s overblown a bit. He does discuss how he and Valerie Bertinelli made out within just a few feet of Eddie Van Halen, after Mr. Van Halen had passed out from drinking too much wine. Hey, I guess I’ve been there myself so I won’t judge. Um, from Mr. Van Halen’s perspective and not necessarily from Mr. Perry’s. But Mr. Perry doesn’t really dwell on it too much. I can understand how Ms. Bertinelli feels about the disclosure although of course Mr. Van Halen is no longer with us. If Mr. Van Halen were still alive I believe that Mr. Perry probably wouldn’t even bring it up. Just a guess.

Well, if you’re a fan of “Friends” and Matthew Perry, and you like to read memoirs, I’ll give a fairly strong recommendation for “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.” If you don’t fit that criteria perhaps you might want to read something else. But if you’re a fan of David Cassidy from “The Partridge Family” I’ll recommend you pass on his memoir. Sometimes it’s better to only remember the good things about your heroes, after all.

I just finished Mathew’s book. I did not realize until I was almost done with his story that it could have been my father’s story accept, my father died after getting septic from colon cancer surgery. He too had a fistula and they gave him liquids which spilled out and killed him. Dad drank, smoked, and took all the same drugs Mathew did. My Dad rejected AA because of step two. My Dad had an irrational fear of “insanity”. My father saw shrinks and they gave him drugs to treat the fear and anxiety. My Dad had seven children with four different woman and many woman on the side. Mathew, my Dad and myself were abandoned at a critical time when we were vulnerable children. I think my Dad, Mathew and I were and are driven by the desire to have that feeling of safety and comfort we lost early in life if it ever really existed. Maybe we are trying to find that feeling of safety and comfort we imagine only exists for others. I also believe that that ‘feeling’ in the gut of anxiety and fear can be about a screwed up digestive track made worse by relationships, drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. Relationships, drugs, alcohol and cigarettes cause and treat the discomfort of fear and anxiety. These substances and behaviors seem to bring relief but only for a moment and then they make it worse. I think the absence of depression and anxiety can be from the absence of an irritable bowel and peace of mind. Mathew was born with colic his stomach was a problem from the start.
Oxy is what blew up Mathew’s colon. The warm honey feeling he describes from the oxy paralyzes the gut bringing on depression and anxiety. At one point Mathew did sixty pills a day. My Dad suffered from Oxy. I experienced it too.

All this stuff impacts mood. Depression, fear, anxiety. Fear of depression, anxiety and fear. The same feelings of abandonment, fear and anxiety a small child feels [I felt] when I became aware I was abandoned. These feelings are alive and well in Mathew’s and my body and they can be triggered by ‘something happening good or bad’ I don’t like to leave my house because just pulling out of my driveway is stressful.

After reading the book I can better understand myself and my Dad. I was not present for my life and I mistreated the people I love while seeking relief from my addiction/discomfort. I even became co-dependent in recovery by trying to replace the substances with gurus. I too had the spiritual experience that made me feel completely loved and free from my insanity. It lasted until I tried to talk about it with other people who did not “get it”. I was distracted by their lack of appreciation for what I was saying.

After reading this book I feel like I have been in rehab for a week. I see my disease better. Mathew Perry lived the unbelievable nightmare of mental illness and lived to tell about it. We focus on the substance when that substance is really just an attempt to treat the real problem. Is self-awareness of the core issue enough to free oneself from the intolerable agony of having paralyzing feelings of being discarded and fearing it will happen again and again. Even if only just by the president of the PTA. Isolation is the only way I knew to protect myself from fulfilling the prophecy my sister made to me. She said I would never have any friends. I was eight years old. She was nine. I believed her. I was all alone on Rancho Drive. I had no friends not even my sister. Just the word “friends” can trigger my discomfort. No matter how many people I call friend I can not dispel that belief. The big secret I carry is I believe I have no value. When people treat me as though I have no value I want to die. Mathew said it annihilated him to be left. Annihilated describes the feeling I want to avoid the most. Until now I could not think of a word strong enough to convey my discomfort. Annihilation feels right. Sadly, whenever I risked talking about this belief, I was told to “get over it”. That would be fine accept it is who I think I am. Can I just get over it?
What or how would I know if I were over it?
“I want God to always be there for me now, whenever I clear my channel to feel his awesomeness.”
I hope you read the book.

Matthew Perry’s memoir about his addictions is brutally honest in both emotional and physical detail. Surely, anyone dealing with addiction will see the elements of their own illness in the details of Perry’s experience. That he appears to have made it out the other side to a place of some peace and calm is a miracle: all the more poignant that it came only a year before his heartbreaking death.

At this point I had to buy the book but I also got the audio so marty could read it to me and I could laugh and cry one last time!!!