Could this BE any less of a book review?

We were home on a Saturday night in October when my son looked up from his phone and said “Oh bummer - Matthew Perry died. You know, the “Friends” guy?” I don’t think he expected us to react as strongly as we did. We were genuinely shocked and saddened, surprising even ourselves. 

I’m slightly older than the demographic that grew up watching “Friends.” I didn’t even really watch it very often when it was still airing on Thursday nights but of course I’ve seen pretty much the entire series now, like everyone else in the English-speaking world. There are actually a lot of things wrong with “Friends,” which I won’t bother to discuss because you can read the “Friends doesn’t hold up” discourse pretty much anywhere on the internet, and I don’t really have anything to add to that discourse. But when the show was good, it was really really good and Matthew Perry was a big reason why. “Friends” was his best work as an actor, but he was also wonderful in “The Whole Nine Yards” and “Fools Rush In,” an absolutely delightful and underrated movie. I was a Matthew Perry fan, I suppose, and didn’t realize it until my son shared the news of his death. 

But we’re talking about the book, aren’t we? "Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing" is a celebrity memoir, which is a genre that I don’t usually read, unless I happen to really love the celebrity. I read Carrie Fisher’s memoirs, and Bruce Springsteen’s. That's who you have to be to get me to read your memoir. I would never have thought to read “Friends, Lovers…” if Perry hadn’t died; but struck by how unexpectedly sad I was at the news of his death, I bought the book and read it in a day. 

First of all, it’s good from a pure literary standpoint. Perry was a good writer (not surprising) and storyteller. Secondly, it is honest in a way that celebrity memoirs maybe attempt but seldom achieve. The Big Terrible Thing was Perry's alcoholism and drug addiction, which he tried over and over again to overcome but ultimately could not. It’s one thing for a celebrity with a history of drug use and wildness to tell stories of promiscuity and partying and waking up in strange homes after blacking out. It’s quite another for that same celebrity to tell his fans about his colon rupture and the months in the hospital with a colostomy bag. I didn’t know that colostomy bags were prone to breaking. I know this now, and although I wish I didn’t, I admire Matthew Perry for sharing the humiliating details. I don’t think he was interested in shocking readers or grossing them out (although I bet he enjoyed the gross-out part). I think that he knew that by sharing his suffering, he could make others suffering similarly feel less alone.  

Last week I was home alone on a Friday night. I was so tired I could have gone to sleep at 8, but I turned on the TV instead, hoping to find a hockey game or an old movie or something. Instead, I found a “Friends” marathon. I think you can turn on a TV anywhere in the United States at any time of day and if you flip through enough channels, you will find a “Friends” rerun. I hadn’t watched the show in years, and I tried to look at it without thinking about 9/11 or new social and cultural norms or the late Obama years or the Trump administration or anything else pre-”Friends.” I tried to look at it as it was in 1994, from the perspective of a person watching it in 1994. And amid funny moments interspersed with cringe (because it's really not 1994), I watched Matthew Perry’s delivery and inflection and timing, which might seem familiar and even hackneyed now but which were completely new and original at the time. Matthew Perry was not wrong when he writes that his performance as Chandler Bing influenced the way an entire generation spoke and even thought. He was a brilliant comedian, a fine actor, and a brave and generous person for telling us about the worst parts of himself, with no filters and no excuses. Rest in peace, Matthew Perry.