Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir

by Matthew Perry

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir (2022) is by Matthew Perry, the Canadian-American actor who played Chandler in Friends. Unlike many celebrity memoirs, Perry had no ghostwriter, and reading it is a bit like hearing a funny friend telling you about the hell he’s going through. It may be a bit garbled at times, but you don’t mind because you want to hear what he’s saying. To say the book is sobering is an understatement: Perry really tries to convey what it’s like living with an addiction and why it’s so hard to get out of. He talks of millions of dollars—and half his life—spent in rehab. And knowledge, sadly, is not power. As he writes in the prologue, “By this point, I knew more about drug addiction and alcoholism than any of the coaches and most of the doctors I encountered at these facilities. Unfortunately, such self-knowledge avails you nothing.”