Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing: The powerful memoir from the beloved star of Friends

Matthew Perry opens by telling us he should be dead, and this memoir explains how a funny, restless boy came so close. At five he was travelling from Montreal to Los Angeles, shuttling between separated parents. At fourteen he was a nationally ranked tennis player in Canada, and at twenty-four he won a lead role in the pilot then called Friends Like Us. Fame arrived, but the void it was meant to fill did not budge, and addiction moved into the gap, through hospital stays and spells in rehab.

He writes about all of it with the timing that made Chandler so loved. He is candid about the family that left him to his own devices, warm about his castmates, and clear-eyed about the peace that sobriety brought him. Read after his death in 2023, the book is funny and painful in equal measure, and it reads as a hand held out to anyone fighting the same battle.