This is a memoir by actor Matthew Perry (1969-2023), whose most famous role for most of us was probably Chandler Bing in Friends.

We loved Friends, and were in California when the last episode aired in May 2004. We armed ourselves with a bottle of Zinfandel and a bag of blue corn chips to watch the bittersweet finale.

Perry's memoir was published in November 2022. Less than a year later, he was dead. Reading this book while knowing that fact gives the experience a ghostly quality.

It opens like this:

"Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty.
"And I should be dead.
"If you like, you can consider what you're about to read to be a message from the beyond, my beyond..."

You can't help but shudder.


Auckland, 2004. Back at home after that month in the US and Canada

***

There's quite a good summary of the book in the obituary here. Perry talks about the experience of working on the blockbuster series that was Friends, and working with Bruce Willis (whom he really admired), and dating and associating with an array of famous people.

But at its core, this is a book about addiction. Because Perry may have been funny, and successful, and famous, and rich -- but the driving force in his life was addiction. To alcohol, to a range of drugs, to tobacco -- and also, you could say, to fame itself (early on, he prays: "God, you can do whatever you want to me. Just please make me famous").

It's a harrowing read. Addiction is a disease, as we know. Perry tells us: "Not only do I have the disease, but I also have it BAD. I have it as bad as you can have it, in fact. It's backs-to-the-wall time all the time. It's going to kill me... Robert Downey Jr, talking about his own addiction, once said, 'It's like I have a gun in my mouth with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the metal.' I got it; I understand that. Even on good days, when I'm sober and I'm looking forward, it's still with me all the time. There's still a gun."

It feels, he says, as though his mind is out to kill him.

The narrative gives us a few clues as to where this came from:

-- He suffered from colic as a baby, and was given phenobarbital (a barbiturate).

-- He traces his lifelong fear of abandonment to the time when he flew unaccompanied from Montreal to Los Angeles at the age of five. Even as an adult, he is pursued by the thought that if he lets someone get really close to him -- so that s/he really knows him intimately -- then that person will end up leaving him. This anxiety is so acute that he tries to control it by pre-empting the abandonment. So he breaks up with Julia Roberts (for example), because he fears that otherwise she will break up with him... The pattern is repeated, ad infinitum. It's a terrible situation to be in.

-- His mother worked hard (as press secretary to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau), so he was often lonely as a child. And he spent his life being attracted to unavailable women (which he eventually figures out has something to do with his relationship with his mother).

-- His kneejerk need to be funny, to please, to make people laugh (reflected so brilliantly in the Chandler character) has many origins. It's a survival mechanism; it's the exertion of a kind of power; it expresses the yearning to be liked ("it would take fifteen years for me to learn that I didn't need to be a joke machine"). Eventually, he realizes: "Everything had to be about me, and I matched that with a really handy inferiority complex, an almost fatal combo."

-- He had his first drink when he was 14. It didn't make him feel sick or weird: It made him feel better. "If I was not in the act of searching for excitement, being excited, or drunk, I was incapable of enjoying anything. The fancy word for that is 'anhedonia'." Again, it's the start of a repeated pattern. Perry's father drank a lot, he notes, but still functioned. And why? Because his father didn't have the Big Terrible Thing...


Innocent, or fatal?

-- So, he starts with alcohol. But then a bad accident results in his being given Vicodin to deal with the pain... Ah, this tragic story again... The story Ocean Vuong told us in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous; the story we heard again in Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead... Seriously, don't ever trust a painkiller until you have a terminal illness... For Perry, the story goes on. When he has pancreatitis, he's given Dilaudid, another opioid, which then becomes his "new favorite drug". Then he's given methadone to get off Vicodin. Except you can't just stop taking methadone either... At one point he's "on methadone, Xanax, cocaine, and a full quart of vodka a day". At one rehab he's given ketamine infusions. "Taking K," he says, "is like being hit in the head with a giant happy shovel. But the hangover was rough and outweighed the shovel. Ketamine was not for me." Again, it's infinitely saddening to read this, given that ketamine was later the cause of his death.


Never really at home anywhere, Perry constantly "does a geographic"

***

This would be a tough hand to play for any human being.

At the time he's writing the book, Perry tells us that he has spent more than USD 7 million trying to get sober. There have been about 6,000 AA meetings. He has de-toxed more than 65 times. He has done rehab 15 times. But -- and this I found quite shocking -- in some of these rehabs, it's really easy to get drugs... "My own experiences and years of conversations with other addicts has led me to believe that most of these places are pieces of shit... They're hellbent on taking advantage of sick needy people and cashing paychecks. The whole system is corrupt and completely fucked-up."

He has his successes. Gets sober. Stays clean for a while. But he realizes: "I'm capable of staying sober unless ANYTHING happens." So, absolutely any eventuality can bring the whole baggage-train off the rails again.

It's the insights into addiction that make this book horribly fascinating. You feel, all the way through, that there but by the grace of God go I... Many of us have addictive personalities. We've just been slightly luckier in our slavemasters...

Perry says he was never suicidal, because he always had some kind of hope at the back of his mind. "But," he goes on, "if dying was a consequence of getting to take the quantity of drugs I needed, then death was something I was going to have to accept... I was able to hold those two things in my mind at the same time: I don't want to die, but if I have to in order to get sufficient drugs on board, then amen to oblivion. I can distinctly remember holding pills in my hand and thinking, 'This could kill me,' and taking them anyway."

Possibly his most poignant statement is this one: "All I ever wanted was to feel better."

It's this honesty, no doubt, that made him instrumental in helping other addicts.



***

The end of the book finds Perry in a comparatively good place. He feels there has been a breakthrough: "Each day is an opportunity, now, a chance for wonder and hope and work and forward motion... The one thing I got right was that I never gave up... And because of that, I stand tall now, ready for whatever comes next."

And again, your heart contracts a bit on reading that. Because what came next was not good.

According to Jason McGahan, Perry was seeking more ketamine than legitimate clinics would supply. So he turned to the kind of unscrupulous people who are always ready to profit by others' misery.

Even while he was promoting his book, and attesting to finally feeling "safe" in his sobriety, the reality was less comfortable. He began to conceal from most of the outside world a dangerous process of backsliding, driving away those who cared about him, and putting his trust in people who were all too willing to exploit him.

McGahan says Perry ended up spending more than USD 67,000 a month on ketamine. On 28 October 2023, he asked his assistant to inject him with "a big one". He passed out in a hot tub at his home, and drowned.

What an infinitely sad end for this smart, witty, talented man... Part of you howls at the unfairness of it all: Why do some people cop this terrible hand at birth? But part of you also thinks: At last, he is at peace. In the text, he describes encounters with God, and sees himself as a "seeker". You just hope he finally found what he was looking for: Perfect love.



***

Now, this is far from a polished book.

I disagree with the view that it reveals too much of "the massive show-off in Perry". After all, he's a larger-than-life character in an utterly tinsel-town world. Any attempt to hide this would have surely come across as gratingly false. And the other side of the coin is that he's nothing if not self-deprecating. If he parades his riches and his conquests, he sure as hell parades his weaknesses and flaws and (literally) shitty experiences. He's also generous to almost everyone, recognizing how much he owes even to people who have not always been helpful.

But I do think there's a lot of repetition that should have been edited out.

And the hoppety-clickety timeframe -- where the chronological account is constantly interrupted by "interludes" -- is completely unhelpful, leaving the reader confused rather than enlightened. Much better would have been to introduce the book with the catastrophic internal "explosion" and the miraculous survival story, and then go back to tell the story chronologically.

But despite these structural infelicities, this is definitely a book that's worth reading. You'll end up understanding much more about this beast called addiction, and feel much more compassionate towards those in its devastating grip.