Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing

I can't say that I feel like I know much more about Matthew Perry after reading his memoir, than I did before reading it.

The basics: He made millions of dollars doing Friends, tried to turn that success into a movie career, all while being drug-addled, feeling inadequate, and self-sabotaging his relationships.

The cycle of addiction/detox/pain management recurring throughout this memoir, along with some jumping in the timeline, made it difficult for me to keep straight what events happened and when they were taking place. The haziness may be apropos, given the stupor Perry seems to permanently exist within; the writing ebbs and flows between precision and vagueness, and never lands in a comfortable middleground for any extended amount of time. This strange cadence expresses itself in the way Perry presents certain individuals on the page. For example, names range from what feels like very formal first-and-last-name mentions (“Jamie Tarses”), to the cloak-and-daggers never-identified-in-the-book “woman I dated for six years” (Google will tell you this is most likely Lizzie Caplan); only a few people receive the typical first-name-only treatment. That, along with Perry's use of the term “geographic” (What does he mean? Who told him he could use that word in that way?) throughout, is a little jarring

Perry talks about the movie “Groundhog Day” and that's kind of what his book feels like: another chapter, another time he almost succumbed to and lost everything to his addiction. The book itself is quite dreary; there's not a whole lot of uplifting, positive experiences showcased here, which is fine (not everyone's life is golden). I guess I just thought there might be something more. 

I'm still a Matthew Perry fan; I hope he finds solace/hope/happiness; I hope his book was cathartic for him, even if it was a bit of a downer for me.