Book Review | Matthew Perry’s ‘Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing’ is a profoundly sad memoir

The '90s popular sitcom 'Friends'.

A writer’s biggest fear is getting distracted. An actor’s biggest fear is not attaining fame. An addict’s biggest fear is not getting drugs every day. Matthew Perry is a popular actor and a popular addict. He’s just written a memoir now; so, he checks all the boxes. But he’s been on the wheel of sobriety for a while and, come on, who are we kidding? Fame has never bidden him goodbye ever since he starred in the sitcom Friends as Chandler Bing – he makes jokes when he’s uncomfortable.

‘Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing’, 2022 (Headline, 272 pages, Rs 799).

And, this autumn, in Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, he opens up about being uncomfortable in his own skin and the pain he shoulders wherever he goes due to the brain he’s been burdened with. Perry’s problem, or, as he calls it, “the Big Terrible Thing,” was never a secret. The fans of the show always knew that something was off with him. In the memoir, he writes, “I’m wearing the same clothes in the final episode of six and the first of seven (it’s supposed to be the same night), but I must have lost fifty pounds in the off-season. My weight varied between 128 pounds and 225 pounds during the years of Friends.”

He's talking about the iconic scene where his character goes down on his knees to propose to Monica Geller (Courteney Cox). He continues, “You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season — when I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills.” Perry, in keeping the tone somewhat light even while recounting his worst days, almost brings Bing back to the page. Many members attached to the cast and crew of Friends, over the years, have mentioned that Perry’s jokes would be worked into the script.

Bing, to be frank, borrows several qualities from Perry. His parents got divorced when he was very young and he couldn’t find a way to put that piece of fact in the back seat and move on. He wanted his father and mother to get back together and, when that didn’t happen, he started putting his feelings into a box and never let anybody take a peek at it. Later, as he was afraid that he’d be abandoned by the women he loved, he came up with the idea of dragging romantic relationships to a dead end.

In the episode The Pez Dispenser, from Seinfeld, the other global success, George Costanza (played by Jason Alexander) breaks up with his girlfriend pre-emptively hoping that it’d give him an upper hand. He wants to be the macho guy who dumps, not the wimp who gets dumped. It’s a theoretically faulty logic, but that doesn’t seem to matter to these men. Of course, Costanza is a fictional character, but the measures that Perry used to adopt are exactly the same. The fear of rejection, perhaps, makes people from all walks of life think of managing risks in unscrupulous ways.

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Perry, currently in his early 50s, expresses an active desire to get married and have children in the final section of the memoir. During the early, heady months of Friends, he was in a relationship with Julia Roberts. But he was of the opinion that drinking would put him in a better place. Then scores of other women came and went. He even candidly introduces some of them, but vehemently maintains that they couldn’t give him what he wanted — a high that he could only derive from turning to alcohol and popping pills.

It's not too late. There’s always time. And there’ll always be people who’d be willing to go the extra mile if they’re treated with kindness and respect. It has taken him a few decades to appreciate his parents and half-siblings, after all. Would it take him some more years to finally arrive at the conclusion that the act of loving concerns giving and receiving both?

The cruellest thing about realisation is that it occurs later. Our innate ability to cherish what we have at the moment is limited. We tend to look for something else, something extra, something that’ll fall into our hands easily. Perry couldn’t look at the light when he was making a million dollars a week. He actually wanted to look away and get in touch with a drug dealer. He couldn’t find happiness in any of his relationships. However, they couldn’t re-shape him. Well, men shouldn’t expect women to change them; a partner isn’t a therapist; a relationship isn’t a Band-Aid!

And although he doesn’t get into the debate of harbouring regrets, I’m guessing this memoir is a result of that. The Big Terrible Thing is mostly about his addiction and hospitalisation. “Nine was the only year I was completely sober for a Friends season,” he writes.

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Friends, for better or worse, has remained a cultural touchstone since the mid-'90s. Whatever else the actors have done after that show, it has followed them like a shadow. It’s a boon and a curse at the same time. Lisa Kudrow, for example, who has written the foreword for the memoir, has won a couple of awards for other movies and series, as well, but she’s still referred to as Phoebe Buffay by the general public.

Chandler is kind of a cartoonish character who has his foot in the mouth and his heart in the right place. With Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry may not be seen as the smart guy with the smart one-liners anymore. The magnanimous image that surrounds him may take a hit. But it’s important to keep in mind that Perry has put the darkness behind him. He has knocked on the door of death a few times from which he has been carefully rescued and put on the bed of recovery.

In a memoir riddled with health scares, failed attempts at keeping his head above addiction, taking potshots at Keanu Reeves (for simply existing), unlike River Phoenix and Heath Ledger who’ve gone down, and not having the courage to go with the flow with regard to romance, what fascinated me the most was the jubilant chapter on Bruce Willis in which Perry tries to curb his enthusiasm. He starred alongside Willis in the blockbuster The Whole Nine Yards (2000) and the former gives an eagle’s eye view of the parties that the latter threw and waxes eloquent about the friendship that blossomed.

Their friendship didn’t last long, though, as their paths “rarely crossed” after the release of the badly reviewed sequel, but he adds a cautious note stating that he prays for him every night. There might be others, too, wishing nothing but the best for Perry. And I hope he gets that. I hope we all get that.