Chandler Bing

The Painfully Transparent Biography of Matthew Perry.

Cover Image of the book, from amazon.

“I deeply cared what strangers thought about me. Infact, its one of the key threads of my life. I asked my mom to paint the backyard blue so that people flying in planes overhead would think we had a swimming pool” — Matthew Perry

I read this quote and felt it lodged somewhere deep in my chest. It’s funny in the way only real pain can be, just like Chandler — howling beneath the surface, dressed up as a joke. And it’s painfully relatable.

I was seriously surprised to see how much of the real Matthew Perry made up Chandler Bing — his upbringing, childhood trauma, people-pleasing-jokeman-personality — all him in real life.

Matthew Perry’s memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, was not the usual tell-all. It felt raw, self-deprecating, and heartbreaking. With a sort of vulnerability that made me extremely uncomfortable, Matthew wrote on fame, addiction, loneliness, and self-worth (or lack thereof).

His story began with a ruptured colon caused by years of substance abuse. A part of Chandler (I mean, Matthew) is very selfaware. He knows of the hole he is trying to fill with his drugs. Even as he talks about his parents in the present tense, there is a palpable sense of distance, and a distinction between the parents he…