Matthew Perry Memoir Revelations: Julia Roberts, Medicine, Extra

The nice, the dangerous and the ugly. Matthew Perry didn’t maintain again in his Mates, Lovers and the Huge Horrible Factor memoir — recalling his high-profile romances, dependancy woes and Mates highs and lows.

“Folks can be stunned to know that I’ve largely been sober since 2001,” he wrote within the e-book, which hits cabinets on Tuesday, November 1. “Save for about sixty or seventy little mishaps through the years.”

The Odd Couple alum revealed that he has been battling medication and alcohol dependancy for many years. In actual fact, he was given phenobarbital when he was a child to cease his colicky cries, a barbiturate he would later flip to throughout his decrease factors.

“When these mishaps happen, if you wish to be sober, which I at all times did, you’d be given medication that can assist you alongside,” he defined. “What drug might you ask? You guessed it: phenobarbital!”

In 1997, Perry obtained hooked on Vicodin after a jet snowboarding accident throughout a movie shoot. He later grew to become hooked on OxyContin after surgical procedure for a colon explosion, which nearly price him his life.

“It was virtually sure at that time that I used to be going to die. Was I unfortunate that my colon exploded? Or was I fortunate that it occurred within the one room in Southern California the place they might do one thing about it?” the previous Go On star wrote of the scary expertise. “Both method, I now confronted a seven-hour surgical procedure, which no less than gave all my family members ample time to race to the hospital. As they arrived they had been every informed, ‘Matthew has a two p.c probability of creating it by means of the evening.’ Everybody was so wrought with emotion that some crumbled to the bottom proper there within the hospital foyer. I must stay out the remainder of my days figuring out that my mom and others heard these phrases.”

His wrestle to remain sober — in addition to his private demons — additionally plagued his love life, together with his short-lived relationship with Julia Roberts.

“[Friends co-creator] Marta Kauffman approached me and stated that I ought to most likely ship flowers to Julia Roberts. You imply the biggest-star-in-the-universe Julia Roberts? ‘Positive, nice, why?’ I stated,” Perry wrote whereas recalling how the romance started. “Turned out Julia had been supplied the put up–Tremendous Bowl episode in season 2 and he or she would solely do the present if she may very well be in my story line. Let me say that once more—she would solely do the present if she may very well be in my story line. (Was I having yr or what?).”

Whereas the 2 did date forward of Roberts’ look on Mates in 1996, by April of that yr, Perry introduced he was single.

“Relationship Julia Roberts had been an excessive amount of for me. I had been continually sure that she was going to interrupt up with me — why would she not? I used to be not sufficient; I might by no means be sufficient; I used to be damaged, bent, unlovable,” the Studio 60 on the Sundown Strip alum confessed in his e-book. “So as an alternative of dealing with the inevitable agony of shedding her, I broke up with the attractive and sensible Julia Roberts. She might need thought-about herself slumming it with a TV man, and TV man was now breaking apart together with her.”

Perry’s dependancy additionally influenced his profession happiness, particularly throughout the late ‘90s and early 2000s when he was taking part in Chandler Bing on Mates.

“Quick-forward to the hiatus between seasons 5 and 6 of Mates and I discovered myself filming The Entire 9 Yards, and positive sufficient, when it got here out in early 2000, I had the primary TV present and the primary film. Me? I used to be taking so many drugs that I couldn’t depart my bed room,” he recalled. “So, in a second whenever you’d suppose Matthew Perry can be celebrating and being the toast of the city, I used to be simply dealing with drug sellers and residing in darkish rooms and distress.”

After spending “upward of $7 million attempting to get sober,” Perry has come out the opposite aspect and is clear. “I’ve been to 6 thousand AA conferences. (Not an exaggeration, extra an informed guess.) I’ve been to rehab fifteen instances,” he revealed. “I’ve been in a psychological establishment, gone to remedy twice per week for thirty years, been to loss of life’s door.”

Scroll right down to see Perry’s greatest bombshells and revelations from Mates, Lovers and the Huge Horrible Factor: