Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
a quasi-review of matthews perry's memoir entitled friends, lovers, and the big terrible thing
Most of us wouldn’t have read this if Perry didn’t die, right? This swell of attention, it’s kind of like how we gather to watch a building burn. We watch from behind barricades, safe and sound as firefighters work. Wondering if it'll burn to the ground. But in this case, we know it's doomed. For me, that was the most interesting (not really the right word) part. Knowing that everything he did, everything he preached, it just didn’t work. It was painful to watch, in a sense. So, pick your metaphor as you like: train-wreck, dumpster-fire, shitstorm... that is Matthew Perry. God love him.
I watched Friends when it originally aired. I liked the show. I wouldn’t consider myself a fan. But it was entertaining. I do like memoirs. Addiction memoirs are perhaps my favorite sub-genre of all the sub-genres, one that I am attempting to debut in as a writer myself. But without Perry’s death the title wouldn’t have been on my radar.
A portion of those who seek this title out will have struggled with addiction. No doubt. The rest, and likely the majority, Friends fans and avid readers. This review will be front-loaded with content for the latter, but by the end I will be making observations exclusively for the former, or as Perry says, my people - “you know who you are.” I will be taking his inventory, essentially, or in other words, pointing out some deficit in his program of recovery (way of life) or character. The inspiration for the inventory analogy is the process by which merchants who, if they would like to be successful, occasionally inspect their goods for those that cannot be sold. There is no need to leave goods that have expired, or which are bad on the shelf. The program Perry speaks about encouraged him to make a similar assessment. To rid himself of those aspects of his character (goods) that no longer served him. The inventory, also known as step four, is meant to be a self-reflective process. So, although I strive to not take the inventory of others (I try not to judge people), and it’s unfortunate that I am going to do it posthumously, the man himself invites us to tell him what his major malfunction is on page 196.
Why is it so hard for me to stay sober when I see my fellows seemingly doing it easily?
I would have much rather he had a chance to read what I’m about to write. I wouldn’t be surprised if the driving force in his completing this work was to find the answer to this question. And others. Notably, “Why am I alive?” which he mused elsewhere in the book. It’s regrettable that he didn’t get what he needed before the day he came to float, face-down, in the hot tub at his beautiful home in California. The one with the view which he so adored. But hopefully someone will get what they need from the words which were written by him, and for him.
FOR FANS
With respect to the Friends fans (who are going to read the book anyway... or more likely, have already read the book), indeed, how he got on the show and various other behind-the-scenes stories are interesting. To that end, he had a few stories about show business which were interesting and well told, for the most part. If you are looking to read about this aspect of his life, you won’t be disappointed, but you should know that it comprises a relatively small part of the book. In total, you’ll hear about his family, his girlfriends, his career. and his disease (the big terrible thing).
A fair amount of his jokes landed. Perhaps 40% were clever enough to laugh at, hypothetically anyway, and 5% I actually lol’d at.
His awareness, and vulnerability and insight, at times, even had me underlining my book. I identified with the man, a multimillionaire with fame and fortune. Me, an aging 90s kid, no fame or extra money to speak of, but plenty of washed-out pipe dreams, and “Mr. Jones” still a regular on my playlists for the longing that Adam Duritz so beautifully illustrates.
Mr. Jones and me Tell each other fairy tales And we stare at them beautiful women She's looking at you Oh no, no, she's looking at me Smiling in the bright lights Coming through in stereo When everybody loves you You can never be lonely
Perry makes the journey to the promised land, then comes back to tell us that the land is barren.
You have to get famous to know that it's not the answer. And nobody who is not famous will ever truly believe that.
Turns out that when everybody loves you, you can be lonely... I can hardly believe it.
FOR BOOKWORMS
For the bookworms, my impression after reading the prologue was that Perry was a more gifted writer than I had anticipated. He tells a story masterfully in those opening pages; I was with him every step of the way. But he wasn’t able to recreate such a good experience, for me, in subsequent chapters. As a writer, we are told to show, and not tell. Perry was constantly diverted from this, the staple of a good book: a good story. We begin the prologue in media res, in the throes of his addiction, which is fine, but with respect to his substance abuse journey the narrative arc is lost as the book goes on. At one point, near the end of the book (consequently near “present-day”), he spends a not-insignificant amount of time telling us about how he’s “dreading” quitting smoking. He describes some tantrums. I didn’t care for any of that cry-baby shit.(view spoiler) [ Although the order to quit smoking came down from medical professionals tasked with helping him stay alive, I felt that time was running out for him to address the elephant in the room. What is the elephant you say? I’m glad you asked. The elephant: “you’ve been telling us about how your relapses and addiction have almost killed you for decades, when do you get to the part where you establish that the sobriety on which you stand to write this work is different?” Whatever the lung issue was, I can’t even remember, it seemed trivial.]
From strictly a structural perspective, he needed to better articulate how the ever-increasing consequences of addiction led him to new understandings every step of the way. Understandings which would allow for “this time to be different.” But I suppose if he were able to do that, he’d still be with us. I’m not saying that the book is completely devoid of wisdom. I’m just pointing out that he didn’t learn the lessons he needed to - to survive. I wanted him to learn about action. I wanted him to say that self-knowledge wasn’t the answer, not gloat about how much he knew about recovery.
Perry hits his stride when he is telling a story and when he does that the book is interesting. He’s likable, forthcoming, and witty. Those are the pros.
The cons: he’s repetitive, disorganized, and he’s slutty with his adjectives (I mostly prefer athletic prose unless you’re Scott Fitzgerald). But, despite all this, it’s a four-star book for me because I like the genre, I like him, most of the stories are interesting, and he is trying to be honest. His attempt at honesty carries more weight for me than “writing chops.” And please note, I am specifically using the word “trying” to describe his honesty (i.e. he is trying to be honest). There are some people who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. He may be in that category. More on that in a bit.
FOR ALCOHOLICS
With respect to those who have encountered addiction, personally, there is a lot to say. It’s clear that Perry has been exposed to AA and knows what things will help him to stay sober. He is able to speak like someone who has reaped the benefits of the program and if you just listened to the catchphrases that he interjects you may even conclude that he did what the program suggested. He is honest about sometimes working the program, and other times not, which led to relapses (i.e. meeting attendance drops off). So, meeting attendance would be considered about a third of the program. If you look at a typical sobriety chip, you’ll see three words: fellowship (this includes meetings), service (helping others), and recovery (the steps). It is widely believed that you’ll be safe from relapse if you are engaged in all three (in the center of the triangle).
(view spoiler)[Perry talks about having a sponsor and about sponsoring people and he mentions the steps, but he doesn’t really go into detail. It could be that he simply doesn’t want to share this stuff, which is fine, but then he says stuff like his mom is “still” his first call when the shit hits the fan. To my recollection, he doesn’t talk about calling his network at any time when he wanted to drink/ use. I’m inclined to think that if “when the shit hit the fan,” someone in the program was his go-to, he may still be with us. And at the very end of the book, he states again, something like “we” do this together. And it was baffling to me because I didn’t get the impression, having read the entire book, that he had learned to rely on the program.] Man, I really wish that he would have done this. He took 10 times the therapeutic dose of Ketamine as reported by The Hollywood Reporter article.
I believe AA typically doesn’t want people to publicly speak about the program for precisely this reason (i.e. Matthew Perry lauds AA and dies two years later of the disease... not a good look... highly visible). It is, after all, supposed to be anonymous. Tradition eleven states: Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and films. After reading the book someone struggling with drugs or alcohol might conclude, perhaps erroneously, that AA cannot work for them. But that would be like saying you don’t believe in using life-preservers because you saw someone drown who was using a life-preserver without realizing that the person you saw had filled it with water instead of air.
It really pains me to sound this negative about Perry’s attempt to help people. I can imagine a slew of hateful comments about this review (or me) if the review gains some traction. But please remember, I am not dancing on his grave, I am answering a question that he himself asked. And I am doing it to help whoever it is that ends up reading this. Why was it so hard for Matthew Perry to stay sober? Let’s stay on point...
Early on, we hear Perry’s take on gratitude. Being grateful every day, for him, is a foregone conclusion.
When you’ve been as close to the celestial as I have, you don’t really have a choice about gratitude: it sits on your living room table like a coffee-table-book – you barely notice it, but it’s there.
This has not been my experience with gratitude, and I believe I have access to the same celestial perspective. When you’re grateful, you know that you’re grateful. Everything about your day is better. Your mood is better. It’s not just something you automatically have because you almost died or thought you were going to die. A lot of us have had near-death experiences and we still struggle. I’m not going to introduce statistics, but in my opinion most alcoholics and addicts don’t recover. But there is some uncommon knowledge circulating about that a grateful alcoholic will never drink. Perry’s statement does not mesh with this uncommon knowledge, for that would mean that as soon as you got close to dying, you would automatically become grateful, and therefore you would never drink again. Obviously, this isn’t so. One of these statements is false, and I believe it’s Perrys. And so, Perry’s seemingly innocuous statement on gratitude may have had fatal implications, in my opinion. The alcoholic mind is a very sick mind. It must be tended to. An alcoholic must find his way to gratitude. Writing it off as something you don’t need to work at, or pay attention to, may have been a cop-out. Perhaps, he wasn’t able to be honest with himself about how grateful he was to be alive.
For me, what helps is (and it may sound cliché): a gratitude list. For years I scoffed at this simple practice. But when I can take space for myself and sit down and put pen to paper (or thumb to screen lol), connect with each one, let myself feel happy, in the moment, when I do that I am rewarded with a specific, definitely noticeable, improvement to my mental health. American life is fast. It helps to pause. Some days it takes quite a while to produce the list. But I stick with it. I try to write out ten things a day and text them to a friend.
Perry didn’t live in gratitude. Living in gratitude is much different than remembering the feeling of gratefulness you had the moment you realized you were still alive. On page 208, the words “all you lucky non-alcoholics” are written. This is also a clue as to his real inner-state. He states, I believe on more than one occasion, that because of his illness he would rather switch places with any of his “less successful” friends. It should have been just the opposite if he were recovered (recovering). He should have been saying that he was grateful for his disease. People do actually say this. People who have gone through just as much hell as Mr. Perry. They see how the lessons they’ve learned, more importantly, the traits they’re acquired, have only come through the anguish that they endured. So, you get over yourself because it’s not about you. It's about the people you can help. And if that fails, or until the day you can appreciate that... it’s life on life’s terms... what other fucking terms are there?
Perry had something along the lines of terminal uniqueness. He was terminally unique. This just means he thought he was THE MOST different. He wrote something along these lines, in terms of addiction, that his case of it was as bad as it gets. That doesn’t even make sense to me. The statement is not congruent with my understanding of the disease. It’s a disease of more. How much do I want? More. When will I have enough? When I have more. More always wants more. It never wants less. Once I get more, I’d like more. No one has addiction “worse” or “better,” it’s a progressive and fatal disease. That’s it. The end is death for every addict and alcoholic who continues to drink or use. Some people are at different stages of the progression. Maybe that’s what he was saying. That he was a low-bottom. Fair enough, in that event, clearly, he was at the end. I never knew anyone to recover who was pointing out the ways in which they were different. It’s one of the basic understandings: don’t compare, identify. I’m sure he knew this, and he probably did it for the most part, but a lurking notion like the one he described, this idea that somehow he’s different, this is the kind of idea that can kill you, because it’ll tell you that things work for “them” and won’t work for “you.” Because you got it so bad.
I could point out stuff like this for a while, but I think I need to wrap it up here. Hopefully, the take-away is that although Perry knew the program, he didn’t really implement it in his life properly, and therefore, the book should not be any sort of guide to sobriety or litmus test for AA. But I would like to go back to this idea of being “constitutionally incapable of being honest with yourself.” This idea comes from the Big Book of AA.
Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average. There are those, too, who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, but many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest.
I appreciate and recognize the kind of honesty that Perry put forth in this book. I believe it was the most honest he could be. But the question is, was he able to be as rigorously honest as is required to recover? He asks so many of the right questions.
(view spoiler) [These days, I have faith in God, but too often that faith seems, well, blocked. But then, everything is blocked by the medication I’m on.
These days, too, I ask this question: Am I blocking my relationship with a higher power by taking Suboxone?”
One of my big problems, and the reason that I’ve had so much trouble getting sober over the years, is I’ve never let myself feel uncomfortable long enough to have a spiritual connection. So, I fix it with pills and alcohol before God can jump in and fix me. (hide spoiler)]
He really tried to recover. He obviously thought a lot. This book is filled with his thoughts. He asks himself why he is here (in this life) and shares that he thinks it has something to do with helping others.
There’s a point in the story where he says that he became suicidal while he was weaning off a certain medication. He says he really wasn’t suicidal, he’s never been suicidal, really, that it was just a result of the medicine. This is another place where I believe Perry’s honesty fails to be truly rigorous. Maybe he was incapable of being honest with himself about why he felt this way. I think this is an important feeling to explore, as uncomfortable as it may be. In my opinion, the most essential question Perry needed to ask himself was not “Why am I here?” but “Why do I want to die?"
These are just my opinions about what went wrong with Matty and it doesn't really matter if they are accurate. These statements are made with limited information and I definitely don't have all the answers or even a lot of answers. The main thing is that it's unfortunate that we lost such a good man to this disease. And we will lose a lot more. If you or a loved one is struggling with alcoholism you may want to reach out and find a meeting by calling AA 24/7 at +1-908-687-8566 or by finding a meeting using this link https://www.aa.org/find-aa