Matthew Perry

Matthew Perry was an American actor best known as Chandler Bing on Friends whose memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is a candid, darkly funny account of addiction, fame, and survival.

Matthew Perry was one of the six stars of Friends, the sitcom that defined a decade of American television and turned him into a global celebrity while he was, for much of it, in the grip of serious addiction to alcohol and opioids. Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, published in 2022, covers his childhood with an absent father, his early career, the years of Friends, and the extraordinary medical crises — including a stomach perforation from opioid overuse that left him close to death — that punctuated his later life. Perry died in October 2023, weeks after the book’s paperback release.

The book is better than most celebrity memoirs because Perry was both a genuinely funny writer and honestly confronting about the specifics of addiction — not just the emotional arc but the daily mechanics of hiding it, the collateral damage to relationships, and the humiliating particulars of hospitalization and withdrawal. His honesty about the scale of his drug and alcohol use during the Friends years, and his analysis of why fame made the addiction worse rather than better, gives the book a clinical self-awareness that separates it from more self-protective accounts.

The criticism of Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is that its treatment of the women in Perry’s life is sometimes self-excusing, and that certain passages mistake celebrity gossip for insight. Perry’s death shortly after publication gave the memoir an unintended posthumous weight — the gallows humor about survival reads differently knowing he didn’t survive much longer. As an honest account of what addiction actually looks like from the inside of a gilded career, it is one of the more useful books of its genre.