matthew perry friends lovers and the big terrible thing

Talking about his romantic trysts, Perry says that he has spent his life being attracted to unavailable women – a trait that he attributes to his complex relationship with his mother. Perry would end up spending a lot of time alone, as she would be away at work. With his father gone, Perry felt it was his role to perform, entertain, cajole, delight and make people laugh – “to soothe, to please, to be the Fool to the entire court.” His mother, a beautiful young woman who was only 21 at the time, soon became the press secretary for Pierre Trudeau, the then Canadian Prime Minister. His lifelong feeling of abandonment stemmed from his early childhood years when his parents split up. “The words of gratitude pour out of me because I should be dead, and yet somehow I am not,” he muses. At one point, he even had a near-death experience, where he felt God’s presence. It was something of a miracle that he came out of all of this alive. After five months, he was finally released. He was put onto an ECMO machine, and thereafter out in a heart and lung ICU unit for six weeks.

For this, he had to have a seven-hour surgery, and had a two percent chance of making it through the night. After that, he went into coma, and his colon exploded. At that point, he was screaming and fighting for survival. The book begins with Perry’s seventh day of excruciating “pain” while at a sober living house in Southern California. He also confesses that sleep has always been a big issue for him, and he has never slept for longer than four hours straight in his life. To fight the fear of being alone, he turned to drugs and alcohol. Though he seemingly had everything on the outside, he was filled with a lurking loneliness from within – “a yearning, clinging to the notion that something outside of me will fix me,” he explains. Further, he has lived half his life in treatment centres and sober living houses. Not many know that Perry has had 14 surgeries, detoxed over 65 times, gone to therapy twice a week for 30 years, been to rehab 15 times and attended 6000 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Matthew perry friends lovers and the big terrible thing