So No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way...

Matthew Perry is the first ‘Friends’ star to write a memoir. In its pages, Amanda Whiting finds a natural storyteller who wants to help others by sharing some of his worst memories

- Amanda Whiting

The “bombshell revelations” from Matthew Perry’s memoir – the first by a Friends cast member – have been trickling out for weeks: Perry was sober for only one of 10 seasons on Friends. He had a years-long crush on Jennifer Aniston and was unceremoniously dumped by Julia Roberts, whom he had wooed by fax machine in 1994. Since his mid-twenties, Perry has spent “upward of $7m” trying to overcome an addiction to alcohol and pills, entered rehab 65 times, and “nearly died” more than once.

Even before the worldwide release of Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing this week, Perry was compelled to issue a retraction over a sentence that hadn't yet been published. Writing on the tragic drug-related deaths of his co-stars River Phoenix and Chris Farley, Perry laments - more than once that somehow "Keanu Reeves still walks among us". (Now, Perry says he wishes he'd used his own name instead of that of the internet's boyfriend.)

So you'd be forgiven for thinking, with all the pre-spilt tea and (possibly contrived) drama, that actually sitting down to read Perry's book would be a redundant exercise. But as a namedropping account of a guy who used to be super famous, it still performs with alacrity. Perry goes out of his way, for example, to squeeze in the time Cameron Diaz decked him, and what he thought of Salma Hayek's acting advice ("long-winded").