Even though it's breaking

I wrote about Matthew Perry last year, for the very worst of reasons, and here I am doing it again, because after reading his autobiography I am filled with so many thoughts and feelings and sadness that I need to put it down somewhere. I loved Perry so much as an actor, and I was shattered by his death. After reading the book in which he related clearly and unflinchingly the story of what was going on all those years that he was bringing joy to me and millions of others, I am more than shattered. I am crushed, despairing, and afraid.

Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing is quite an extraordinary book. It’s beautifully written, by a man who was an accomplished writer, though that side of his professional life may not be well known to many. It’s filled with humour, humanity, compassion and insight. It’s illuminating and fascinating and frequently funny, but most of all it is harrowing.

It’s a seriously difficult read, because although it contains stories about showbusiness, Hollywood, celebrities, and of course Friends, it is mostly the story about a man’s journey through Hell.

Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing is a memoir of addiction. That’s the “big terrible thing” of the title: the horrific disease that plagued Perry for the majority of his life. I would recommend anyone who is unfamiliar with the dreadful impact of addiction - like me - to read Perry’s book, because the actor opens right up and lets us in to the full, nightmarish reality of what it means to be in thrall to the disease.

Now, Perry is not the only person to have fought addiction. He was the first to admit that he was a lucky man, not least in the fact that he had millions of dollars to go through myriad stints of rehab and access to the best of treatment for his sickness. The fact that all those millions still weren’t enough to defeat it is chilling. But although countless others have gone through similar struggles, and by no means is Perry’s fight more important because he was famous, it IS more directly confronting for someone like me - and I imagine, probably for someone like you - because here it is, in a book in black and white, and because though we didn’t know Matthew Perry, we…kind of did, didn’t we?

At least, we knew Chandler. The book reveals just how much of Perry was in Chandler: the wit and the charm and the quick mind and the generosity of spirit; but also the insecurity, the self-loathing, the need to use humour as a defence mechanism and the fear that sabotaged relationships. For both good and bad traits, much of what we laughed at in Chandler Bing was present in Matthew Perry.

But there was a lot of Perry that wasn’t in Chandler, too, and finding out about it, learning how dark and miserable life got for the man who was making us laugh, is a jolt. Because we knew Chandler, and throughout this book we are forced to see Chandler suffering impossible agonies.

Chandler, at five years old, an unaccompanied minor put on a plane alone to visit his father in Los Angeles. Chandler in his teens, smoking and drinking and fighting and spinning out of control because he doesn’t know where he fits. Chandler seeing all his dreams come true and finding out they were the wrong dreams. Chandler getting the job he wanted more than anything in the world, and going home from it each night to sit alone and drink and take pills because he could not handle the aching emptiness inside. Chandler popping eighteen hundred milligrams of Oxycontin PER DAY just to feel normal. Chandler lying to friends and family and counsellors and doctors. Chandler screaming in pain on the floor of a rehab centre. Chandler lying in bed with a broken colostomy bag, after the drugs caused his colon to explode. Chandler on the brink of death, time and again.

It’s so hard to read. If you can read Perry’s story through without crying, kudos. I couldn’t.

But all the struggles, all the pain, all the hell…that’s not why this book has left me feeling like there’s a hole in my heart.

The thing that has brought me to despair is that Matthew Perry’s autobiography has a happy ending. It ends with Perry happy - and oh how you feel he deserved some happiness, finally. It ends with Perry grateful for his family and his friends and all the people who had helped him survive. It ends with Perry clean and sober and looking forward to the next exciting chapter in his life: new work, new acting, new writing. It ends with reflections on the beauty of the world, and of his connection with God. It ends with him hoping to find a new relationship, having ruined many with wonderful women before, and speaking of his love of children and wish to have his own someday. It ends with joy, and hope, and redemption, and a message to all addicts: I survived, and so can you. You can be happy too. You can beat this thing. It’s possible. There is always light at the end of the tunnel.

And that ending is the most devastating thing of all, because we know that the book’s happy ending wasn’t the one that Matthew Perry’s life got. Less than a year after Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing was published, Perry was dead. With his blood full of ketamine and buprenorphine - a drug prescribed to treat opioid addiction - he drowned, at home. He was alone, the thing he was always terrified of being, and the fear of which drove so much of his addiction.

Less than a year. Less than a year after he had put out into the world his message of love and light and hope, it was all extinguished. He’d written that he’d beaten the odds, but he hadn’t. He’d written that God had saved him from death by addiction. He hadn’t. He’d written that life held the greatest of promise. It didn’t.

The Big Terrible Thing got him in the end. And now you can’t read that book without weeping not just for the pain he went through and the misery he endured, or even for the potential lost. You weep because every fear he expresses in the book was fulfilled, and every hope was dashed.

And I can’t help but think…is there truly any hope out there at all? All of Matthew Perry’s money and fame and dreams come true did not make him happy, or save his life. As he wrote, his brain was out to kill him.

A lot people’s brains are out to kill them. Some of them through addiction. Some of them through depression, or anxiety, or schizophrenia, or any of the other countless vile diseases that prey on us, that turn our minds inside out and upside down and eat relentlessly away at our lives.

What the life and death of Matthew Perry tells me is that it just won’t stop. The monster in your head will keep chasing you, and it will not give up. It hides for a while, it bides its time, it lets you think it’s gone, but it never is. It’s waiting for its chance, and it will come again and again and again and again until its job is done. That job is to annihilate you from the inside. It won’t let you escape. It won’t concede defeat. You will have to keep on running from it until you are too exhausted to run anymore.

Or maybe not. I don’t know. Maybe you can beat that monster. Not every story ends like Matthew Perry’s. Maybe for some of us, the monster gives up. Or maybe it’s possible, if you can keep summoning the energy, and you’re lucky, to keep ahead of him until your life runs out its natural course, and the monster has to let peace take over.

But Matthew Perry - a man who, the book makes clear, was possessed of enormous intelligence, strength and courage - couldn’t do it. He thought he’d done it, but he hadn’t. And that burns so badly. He gave happiness in infinite amounts, but was happy himself for so little of his life, and just when it seemed the ledger was going to start being balanced, it all came crashing down.

In the dark dark night I sit alone, knowing exactly what Perry meant when he wrote of the terror of solitude, and I wonder when it will all come crashing down for me. And I wonder if it’s even worth the effort to try stopping it.