Title: Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing
Author: Matthew Perry
Narrator: Matthew Perry
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Publication date: November 1, 2022
Print length: 250 pages
Audio length: 8 hours, 49 minutes
Genre: Memoir
Source: Library
Rating:

Reviewing a memoir often feels like a weirdly invasive endeavor. Who am I to praise or criticize the author? Sure, we can talk about how the book made us feel or what we think of of the writing, but a memoir is such a personal creation that it’s difficult to say much more than that.

In the case of Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, it’s an extraordinarily bizarre and uncomfortable experience to read this memoir — and especially, to listen to the audiobook narration by Matthew Perry himself — only a few short months after his tragic death.

As the synopsis shows, the opening lines of the book are eerie, and the following paragraph even more so:

If you like, you can consider what you’re about to read to be a message from the beyond, my beyond.

I was a big fan of Friends back in the day, and always adored Chandler. I knew very little about the actor behind the character, other than the gossip and scandals that cycled through the headlines over the decades — tales of addiction, destructive behavior, and rehab after rehab.

Here, in Matthew Perry’s memoir, we get a personal tour of his life, from childhood through his early 50s (just two years prior to his death) — and it’s profoundly sad in so many ways. Surprising too — I’d assumed that he was yet another example of someone destroyed by fame, but as we learn in this book, Perry’s drinking and addiction started many years before he became a break-out star.

Blending a recounting of his childhood and teens, his early years in the show biz industry, his phenomenal success in Friends, and beyond with interludes where we get uncomfortably up close and personal with the horrid details of the torment he inflicts on himself through his excessive use of drugs and alcohol, the memoir lets us inside his life and shows us the person behind the tabloid stories.

Perry comes across as smart, funny, and deeply wounded. His is a fascinating, tragic story told by someone living the addiction, and it’s not pretty (although he manages to inject his sense of humor even into the most harrowing of episodes).

I occasionally felt that it was all too much. I didn’t need to know quite that much about his ups and downs, the vast quantities of pills, the physical impact of his addictions, and his sex life. But then again, this is his truth that he’s sharing — as I said, it’s hard to criticize a memoir. Could he have toned it down or shared a bit less? Sure. But this is his story, and that’s what I signed up to experience.

I know he also got quite a bit of flak for some of his attempted jokes that fall flat in delivery, in particularly a passage where he laments the too-young deaths of brilliant talents like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger, then follows up by saying “but Keanu Reeves still walk among us.” And then repeats the Keanu Reeves line again later after talking about Chris Farley’s death. Dude, why do you have it in for Keanu Reeves? (Perry apparently apologized for this after the book came out and said the line would be removed from future editions… but it’s definitely there in the library book and audiobook I borrowed.)

I imagine that listening to this audiobook six months ago might have been a very different experience. Listening now, after Perry’s death, is truly like listening to a voice from beyond the grave. Every time he talks about barely surviving or how lucky he is not to be dead, it’s a shock.

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is an intimate look into the life and psyche of a complicated, troubled, unhealthy person who was also insanely talented, incredibly funny, and apparently, a person with a very loving heart. Hearing his voice sharing his story made me very sad for the loss of him as a person and as a talent. If only his next performance were still to come, rather than this book being his final good-bye.

I do recommend Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. It’s sad and difficult, but I’m glad that Matthew Perry chose to share himself with the world in this way. We’ll never know what else he might have done.