Wednesday 2 November 2022 01:52 PM CALLAHAN: I was repulsed by Matthew Perry turning addiction into showbiz. Then ... trends now
Matthew Perry is America's most complicated 'Friend.'
No wonder the promotional tour for his new memoir, 'Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,' has felt off.
His book doesn't lend itself to sound bites, or joust-y Q&A's on morning or late night shows, or neat conclusions drawn at the end of lengthy celebrity profiles accompanied by high-gloss photos of Perry in a $600 Tom Ford shirt and $218 jeans (see GQ).
Perry's book has been stripped for parts, all the 'shocking revelations' compiled into listicles: The colonoscopy bags, the drugs, losing all his teeth, the fling with Julia Roberts, the swipes at other celebrities (Keanu Reeves, Eddie Van Halen), the time Jennifer Aniston tried to intervene.
I suspect I'm not alone in feeling put off at first.
Even for a celebrity tell-all, Perry's revelations can feel pornographic, designed to shock, and his press tour a perverse kind of peacocking. Not to mention the soupçon of meanness here — especially the digs at Reeves, one of the nicest and most beloved stars on the planet. Those have been rightly assailed as gratuitous. Petty.
And most of us have experience with addiction, be it our own or a loved one's. The commodification of such life-and-death struggles can often feel cheap.
Then I read Perry's book. And guess what? It's not your typical celebrity-slash-addiction memoir. It doesn't follow the predictable narrative arc, our hero going from obscurity-to-global-fame-and-unimaginable-wealth-to-drug-and-alcohol-addiction-to-rock-bottom-to-all-better.
Matthew Perry is America's most complicated 'Friend.' No wonder the promotional tour for his new memoir, 'Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing,' has felt off.
There is no neat bow wrapping up Perry's story. There is no happy ending here. That's what makes it a worthwhile read, and so worth resisting the binary reactions from fans online — sympathy for Perry at first, then revulsion when his unkind comments about Reeves leaked.
Matthew Perry is the first to admit: He's a mess, a ball of contradictions, congenitally unhappy, a mystery even to himself. He goes deeper than you'd expect — and as anyone who has known a true addict can attest, that is no easy feat.
So can we all be adults and withhold snap judgments for a hot minute?
'Friends, Lovers, and The Big Terrible Thing' is a richer, more nuanced book than expected. Perry begins by introducing himself as 'Matty,' and tells us plainly: 'I should be dead.'
Perry has clearly been through a ton of psychotherapy: He searches for the childhood wound, writing of his father's abandonment when he was a baby, of his parents splitting up and their subsequent remarriages, of feeling like the odd kid out as his mother and father built new families, his subsequent attachment disorders with women and alcohol-fueled sexual impotence.
But more catastrophic, to my mind, is a doctor's decision to prescribe a two-month-old colicky Perry phenobarbital to stop his crying.
You read that and think: This guy never had a chance.
Perry was on that incredibly powerful drug for one month, he writes, when he was between 30 and 60 days old.
'This is an important time in a baby's development,' Perry writes, 'especially when it comes to sleeping. (Fifty years later I still don't sleep well.) Once the barbiturate was on board, I would just conk out . . . and this would cause my father to erupt in laughter. He wasn't being cruel; stoned babies are funny. There are baby pictures of me where you can tell I'm just completely f***ing zonked, nodding like an
