The One Where Matthew Perry Writes an Addiction Memoir

[Uncle Joe]

By the time he was 49, Matthew Perry writes in his new book, he had spent more than half of his life in treatment centers or sober living facilities.Credit...Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times

Published Oct. 23, 2022
Updated June 20, 2023

(snip)

I have watched every episode of “Friends” three times — in prime time, on VHS and on Netflix — but I’m not sure I would have recognized Perry if I’d seen him on the street. If he was an ebullient terrier in those 1990s-era Must See TV days — as memorable for his full-body comedy as he was for the inflection that made “Can you BE any more [insert adjective]” the new “Gag me with a spoon” — he now seemed more like an apprehensive bulldog, with the forehead furrows to match.

As his former co-star Lisa Kudrow confesses in the foreword to his memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” the first question people ask about “Friends” is often “How’s Matthew Perry doing?”

Perry answers that question in the book, which Flatiron will publish on Nov. 1, by starkly chronicling his decades-long cage match with drinking and drug use. His addiction led to a medical odyssey in 2018 that included pneumonia, an exploded colon, a brief stint on life support, two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag, more than a dozen stomach surgeries, and the realization that, by the time he was 49, he had spent more than half of his life in treatment centers or sober living facilities.

(snip)

“I would fake back injuries. I would fake migraine headaches. I had eight doctors going at the same time,” Perry said. “I would wake up and have to get 55 Vicodin that day, and figure out how to do it. When you’re a drug addict, it’s all math. I go to this place, and I need to take three. And then I go to this place, and I’m going to take five because I’m going to be there longer. It’s exhausting but you have to do it or you get very, very sick. I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to feel good. I certainly wasn’t a partyer; I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie. That was heaven for me. It no longer is.”

(snip)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/23/arts/television/matthew-perry-friends-lovers-and-the-big-terrible-thing.html

[Deuxcents]

1. Seems to be little feelings for redemption

As all we hear about is his addiction. Why not the emphasis on his hard work to come back from his hell and torment to be sober and his efforts to help others by opening a place for other addicts?

[Uncle Joe]

3. The article does talk about Matthew's primary motivation in putting it on paper,

being in helping others not go through the hell that he has gone through.

[elleng]

2. How awful.