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Matthew Perry review – being Chandler Bing

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"By turns fascinating and maddening, Perry’s memoir is less a tale of a glittering showbiz career than a fitfully gruesome account of his efforts to keep the show on the road. He reckons to have attended 6,000 AA meetings, detoxed 65 times, and spent in the region of $7m to get sober. The drily funny tone is typical of Perry, who read the early Friends scripts and saw a kindred spirit in the smart, withering Chandler. Realising in his teens he could use humour to get people’s attention, he turned being funny into an Olympic sport. His problems started well before he became a household name. A child of divorced parents, he had long felt like an outsider in his own family. From the age of five, he would travel alone by plane from Montreal to visit his father in Los Angeles wearing a sign that read “Unaccompanied minor”. At 14, he was delighted to discover that drinking quelled the negative thoughts and made him more charming too. Later on, a painkiller prescription brought fresh serenity and soon he was knocking back 55 pills a day. Perry’s addictive personality was also evident in his relentless quest for fame, which he believed would solve his problems: “I think you actually have to have all of your dreams come true to realise they are the wrong dreams,” he writes. The actor makes no bones about his atrocious behaviour, delivering scattergun apologies to family, colleagues and ex-girlfriends including Julia Roberts, whom he dumped purely out of fear that she would dump him first." But if the many hospital visits, detox programmes and breakups have been chastening, the massive show-off in Perry hasn’t been entirely vanquished. He blithely refers to himself as one of the funniest guys on the planet, gets antsy about reviews and can’t stop talking about how rich he is (buying property seems to be another addiction). Elsewhere, he misjudges the mood with a gag in which he asks why “original thinkers” such as River Phoenix and Heath Ledger die while Keanu Reeves is still alive, and makes a tone-deaf pronouncement about a friend who “never made it as an actor, has diabetes, is constantly worried about money, doesn’t work. I would trade places with him in a second.” " 12/06/22 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/nov/16/friends-lovers-and-the-big-terrible-thing-by-matthew-perry-review-being-chandler-bing