Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing A Memoir

one of the things he said was that he wanted more than anything, his legacy to not be friends, but to be the fact that he got sober and helped other people get sober.

as Maureen Callahan wrote up in a great piece that's posted now, his greatest performance was not on friends. It was as a newly sober good guy who just wanted to help others get clean.

I met her two years earlier at another rehab where she had been working at the time.

I didn't get sober back then, but I saw how wonderful she was in every way and promptly stole her from the sober living rehab and made her my assistant.

She too understood the nature of addiction and would come to know my struggles better than any doctor I'd ever seen.

You know, I was reading the Britney memoir as soon as it came out last week. And I kept thinking about Matthew Perry because at this time last year, I was reading his memoir and columning on his memoir and his, his memoir struck me as so much more candid than the average celebrity memoir.

the amount of trauma and physical debilitation and pain and the sheer consumption, not just of drugs, but alcohol. And, you know, he was a three pack a day smoker, which I forgot about. I didn't know that. You know, just the, what he put his body through and that he was still even alive. And that book to me felt like, I mean, talk about a legacy play that book to me felt like I may not live much longer. And this is the thing I want to be remembered for not being on a sitcom, not being the sort of Gen X icon, but trying to help other people who are as tormented as I am.

And he says in the book, like I would give everything up if I could just not feel the way I feel about myself.

his book has now overtaken hers on the Times bestseller list.

That book was something else.

I thought it was quite a gripping book. I thought it was very honest.

he spent I think he said he spent seven million dollars trying to get clean and just couldn't.

you could tell what were or I was in my addictions by what I look like on the show. If I was heavy, it was alcohol. If I was skinny, it was pills. And if it was skinny with a goatee, it was lots of pills.

Oh, yeah. We just came out with a book, actually. Really? Interesting. Okay. Yeah, like a memoir.

Last year, he wrote a bestselling memoir detailing his own struggles with addiction. Its title was Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.

That's one of the themes of Matthew Perry's book.

But when he was a kid, yeah.

He can kind of trace it back to...He was medicated early on.

Like she's Cody from serves up Streisand's autobiography follows on the heels of books from celebs like Viala Davis Jeanette Mercurdy, Matthew Perry, Pamela Anderson, Jada Pinkett Smith, Britney Spears and of course Prince Harry

According to his 2022 memoir, He spent at least seven million dollars on treatment and had 65 stints in detox beginning at the age of 26.

Your disease is just outside, just doing one-arm pushups, just waiting, just waiting for you, waiting to get you alone. Because alone, you lose to the disease.

And now I finally feel okay and feel like I've got some strength.

He wrote a book about it. He talked about it.

Everything I've learned about Matthew Perry I've learned in the past 48 to 72 hours.

He talked about his relationship with his dad. He talked about that and all that. And like you said, I heard that on the news.

But I would sometimes say a line and they wouldn't laugh and I would sweat and and just like go into convulsions. If I didn't get the laugh I was supposed to get.

He spent nine million dollars on addiction, 14 stomach surgeries, 15 rehab stays, therapy twice a week for 30 years and then he bought all the dope, the booze you can buy.

He talked about it in his book that he used ketamine in rehab to get over his physical pain and things like that.

when I die I don't want friends to be the first thing that's mentioned I want that helping other addicts to be the first thing that's mentioned and I'm going to live the rest of my life proving that

I would like to be remembered as somebody who lived well loved well was a seeker and his paramount thing is that he wants to help people that's what I want

In his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry claimed to have been to rehab 15 times, detox 65 times, and spent about $7-9 million trying to get sober.

It's like that Bible verse, Matthew chapter 18, verse six.