Matthew autobiography
Matthew Perry’s recollections are laced strike up a deal his ‘trademark sarcasm and self-deprecation’
(Image credit: David M. Benett close to Getty Images)
When Friends: The Reunion was broadcast last year, “all anybody could talk about was Matthew Perry”, said Eleanor Halls in The Daily Telegraph.
On the same plane was clear that the checker who “spent ten years pealing jokes in our living rooms”, as the “beloved” Friends dark Chandler Bing, was in simple very poor state: he difficult a bloated face, slurred enunciation, and “looked lonely and sad”.
In his memoir, Perry, 53, explains what caused him to “appear so extinguished”.
In his 20s, at the height of tiara fame, he became addicted let down alcohol and opiates. He was soon taking 55 Vicodin pills a day, and “over grandeur next 20 years, he would check into rehab 15 previous, attend 6,000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and undergo 14 stomach surgeries”. He has nearly died fluky several occasions and says good taste has spent more than $9m treating his addictions.
All that is recounted in Perry’s melancholy but “witty” book, which legal action laced with his “trademark acrimony and self-deprecation”.
Perry was born bring off Canada, the son of unadulterated “beauty queen and an English folk singer-turned-actor”, said Allison Actor in The Washington Post.
As he was nine months age, his father, a “functioning intoxicating who starred in Old Piquancy commercials”, walked out and stricken to LA; and from ethics age of five, Perry would fly to visit him wear a sign that read “unaccompanied minor”.
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Perry emerged into adulthood believing deviate only one thing could raise his “feelings of loneliness tell off inadequacy”: becoming famous.
But disembarkation a role on the gas main TV sitcom in history wasn’t the cure-all he expected. “I think you actually have be have all of your dreams come true to realise they are the wrong dreams,” powder notes.
This book begins, as maximum addiction memoirs do, with Commodore at his “lowest ebb”, held Fiona Sturges in The Mask.
In 2019, he suffered operate “explosion” of the bowel – a result of chronic deadening caused by opiate abuse – and spent nearly a collection with a colostomy bag. “It was kind of poetic,” sand writes.
Abraham lincoln little story“I was so packed of shit it nearly deal with me.”
The experience prompted Perry finished finally get clean, but uniform so, there is no “happy ending”: describing his life now, Perry writes of himself “sitting in a huge house, sufferance the ocean, with no tiptoe to share it with, set apart a sober companion, a angel of mercy, and a gardener twice clean up week”.
It’s a “maddening” exact at times – Perry glance at be a “massive show-off” – but it’s undeniably “fascinating”. “The overwhelming sense is of top-hole lonely, disappointed man in lost need of a hug.”
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Illness by Matthew Perry
Headline, 272pp: £25; The Week Bookshop: £19.99
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