So No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way

Matthew Perry spent years as one of the most famous, most likeable, most highly compensated people on television. It nearly killed him.

- Chris Heath

TO GIVE A SENSE of what it might be like to read Matthew Perry’s remarkable, startling, and heartfelt memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, I'd like to share one particular reader’s experience:

A few months after completing the book, Perry was scheduled to record the audiobook version. That was when it struck him that although he had written the book—and he really had written it himself, double thumbing the first halfin the Notes app on his phone before finishing the rest on his iPad—he had never actually allowed himself to read it from start to finish. The following day, he would be expected to perform these words into a microphone. Perhaps he should take steps to prepare himself. So he lay on his bed, iPad in front of him, and dove in.

Writing the book had felt freeing. I was completely honest,” he says. It just fell out of me. It just fell on to the page.” But this was the moment when its author discovered that it was one thing to have written the true story of Matthew Perry. It was quite another thing to read it.

“I read it,’ he says, and cried and cried and cried. I went, Oh, my God, this person has had the worst life imaginable!’ And then I realized, This is me I’m talking about...?”

That night, Perry couldn’t even bear to be in the same room as his words.

“Because I had to go to sleep,” he says, I actually took the iPad and put it outside my room. Because it was too close, too painful.”