CALLAHAN: I was repulsed by Matthew Perry turning addiction into showbiz. Then I read his book

Matthew Perry is America’s most complicated “friend.”

No wonder the promotional tour for his new memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing” has failed.

His book doesn’t lend itself to sound bites or jousting questions and answers on morning or late night shows, or neat conclusions drawn at the end of lengthy celebrity profiles accompanied by high-gloss photos of Perry in a $600 Tom Ford shirt. and $218 jeans (see GQ).

Perry’s book is stripped of parts, all the “shocking revelations” bundled into lists: the colonoscopy bags, the drugs, losing all his teeth, the affair with Julia Roberts, the swipe at other celebrities (Keanu Reeves, Eddie Van Halen), the time Jennifer Aniston tried to intervene.

I suspect I’m not the only one feeling scared off at first.

Even for a celebrity who says it all, Perry’s revelations can feel pornographic, meant to shock, and his press tour a perverse kind of peacock. Not to mention the soup of meanness here – especially the digs at Reeves, one of the most beautiful and beloved stars on Earth. They have rightly been attacked as gratuitous. petty.

And most of us have experience of addiction, whether it’s our own or a loved one. The commercialization of such a life-and-death struggle can often feel cheap.

Then I read Perry’s book. Guess what? It’s not your typical celebrity memoir. It doesn’t follow the predictable storyline, our hero goes from obscurity to global fame and unimaginable wealth to drug and alcohol addiction to rock bottom to everything better.

There is no neat bow that rounds out Perry’s story. There is no happy ending here. That’s what makes it worth reading, and so worth resisting the binary comments from fans online — first sympathy for Perry, then disgust when his unkind comments about Reeves leaked.

Matthew Perry is the first to admit: he is a mess, a ball of contradictions, innately unhappy, a mystery even to himself. It goes deeper than you’d expect – and as anyone who’s known a real addict can attest, it’s no easy feat.

So can we all be adults and remember quick judgments for a minute?

Friends, Lovers, and The Big Terrible Thing is a richer, more nuanced book than expected. Perry starts by introducing himself as “Matty” and tells us bluntly, “I should be dead.”

Perry has clearly gone through a lot of psychotherapy: he searches for the wound from his childhood, writes about his father’s abandonment when he was a baby, about his parents’ separation and their subsequent remarriage, whether he felt like an outsider. as his mother and father built new families, his subsequent attachment disorders with women and alcohol-fueled sexual impotence.

But more disastrous I find a doctor’s decision to prescribe a two-month-old colicky Perry phenobarbital to stop his crying.

You read that and think: this man never had a chance.

Perry took that incredibly potent drug for a month, he writes, when he was between 30 and 60 days old.

“This is an important moment in a baby’s development,” Perry writes, “especially when it comes to sleep. (Fifty years later, I still don’t sleep well.) Once the barbiturate was on board, I just gagged. . . and this would make my father burst out laughing. He was not cruel; stoned babies are funny. There are baby photos of me where you can see I’m just fucking drunk, nodding like an addict at seven weeks old.”

Is it any wonder Perry grew up to be such a hardcore addict? That being struck down by pancreatitis at age 30 wasn’t enough to make him stop drinking? Or that the loss of a part in ‘Don’t Look Up,’ his three scenes with Meryl Streep, the destruction of his probably last chance to work with Oscar winners because his life was ‘on fire’ wasn’t enough?

If you doubt that addiction is a disease, Matthew Perry’s story will blow your mind.

When he first gets drunk at age 14, Perry writes that he feels something he’s never felt before: normal. That’s Perry telling us he’s wired differently, that his emotional and genetic makeup puts him at the highest risk of substance abuse.

“I realized,” Perry writes, “that for the first time in my life nothing bothered me. . . I was complete, at peace. I had never been happier than at that moment.’

Later, as a struggling young actor, Perry gets on his knees and begs God for fame. “I longed for it more than any other person on Earth,” he writes. ‘I needed it. It was the only thing that would restore me.’

He will later call this his Faustian bargain. Fame, and the wealth and privileges that come with it (chain-smoking in his hospital bed; crashing his Porsche to no avail in a neighbor’s living room; sleeping with every willing woman in Los Angeles; buying a new mansion every time he finished drug addiction ) only made his illness worse.

You’ve no doubt heard the book’s major takeaways elsewhere: the 55 Vicodin a day, the 65-plus detoxes, the $9 million spent on rehab, the weight swings from 128 to 225 pounds, the surprise that he’s still alive. And not to be cynical, Perry is a creature of show business: he knows what will sell. He has his talking points down. He knew what to include to generate headlines and clicks, controversy and likes.

But that doesn’t detract from the book’s brutal honesty. At one point, Perry writes of his affinity with Robert Downey Jr., who also took drugs as a child and once said of his own addiction, “It’s like I have a gun in my mouth and my finger on the trigger, and I love it.” the taste of the metal.’

But the story of Robert Downey Jr. has a happy ending: the comic book hero franchise, the stable family life, the ne’er-do-well-made-good. RDJ, as we know him anyway, is The Guy Who Figured It Out.

Matthew Perry, says the man himself, is not that guy. He wants to be, but doesn’t understand why not. He wonders why some of his peers can party and quit like he says Bruce Willis did, but why he doesn’t have an “off” button of his own.

Addiction has ruined so much of my life that it’s not funny anymore. He’s had fourteen surgeries, has cried after each, and will need many more.

“I will never be ready,” he writes. “I’ll always have the guts of a man in his nineties. . . the scars . . . my stomach looks like a topographical map of china. And they fucking hurt.’

Perry ends his book on a hopeful note, but not before telling us the truth: his story probably doesn’t have a happy ending. But maybe it will help to help others who struggle with addiction – the people to whom he dedicates his book.

“I am so close to death every day,” he writes. “I have no other sobriety in me. If I went out, I could never come back. . . It’s going to kill me.’

Matthew Perry could have kept half of these revelations to himself and still have a bestseller. He didn’t have to be so exposed, and whether his motives were purely altruistic or not, he really did a favor here. His book is a worthy addition to a genre that all too often feels rotten, narcissistic and predictable.

Hopefully for Perry that’s enough.