Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry is a Straightforward and Frank Memoir!
“Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know mFriends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry is a Straightforward and Frank Memoir!
“Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty. And I should be dead.” ~ Matthew Perry
Believe me when I tell you I had absolutely no intention of ever reading this book. I thought Matthew Perry was just another Hollywood bad-boy actor who took life to excess, lived to write a book about it, and moved on. Then he died.
I know this sounds crazy but hearing about Matthew's death broke me. It was a trigger that brought back painful memories of my brother Denny's struggle with alcoholism. He fought so damn hard to get to the other side of this disease but he couldn't reach it. His death from cirrhosis of the liver at age thirty-nine was a tragedy my family has quietly lived with every day since his death. A small piece of each of us went with him when he left us.
"Alcoholism wants you alone, it wants you sick, and then it wants to kill you."
I watched a YouTube video of Matthew's interview on Q with Tom Power filmed shortly after Friend and Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing was published. What I heard was shocking and shortly afterwards, I knew I wanted to listen to Matthew's story in his own words. I finished the audiobook in two long listens. It was a straightforward and frank first-person narration, a bit repetitive and long winded at times, but compelling none-the-less, with years of details to digest.
No one had any idea how out-of-control Matthew's life had become. Those details were Matthew's deepest darkest secrets that he kept locked away inside his head for decades. His body was ravaged by alcohol and drug abuse and literally taken to the edges of death at one point. How he ever got through his addiction to the other side is truly a miracle.
"Alcoholism doesn't care. It's cunning, baffling, and powerful...and it never goes away."
From my point-of-view, writing his story gave Matthew peace, the desire to offer help to others struggling with sobriety, and visible humility in knowing he would always have the disease of addiction and alcoholism. I do recommend Friends and Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing but with caution. It's only Matthew's story, one that eventually ended well.
And then it didn't...
In 1956, the American Medical Association identified alcoholism as a disease.
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