Friends, lovers and the big, terrible thing

Another celebrity child's unflinching addiction memoir — opioid dependency, grief, and fame's suffocating weight told with raw honesty comparable to Perry's candour.

If you're searching for books like Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Lisa-Marie Presley's posthumous memoir is one of the most direct parallels you'll find. Like Matthew Perry, Presley writes about opioid addiction from the inside — the pull, the shame, and the wreckage it leaves across relationships and career. Both books sit inside the world of inherited, outsized fame (Presley as Elvis's daughter, Perry as a Friends cast member) and both authors confront near-death with brutal directness. Where Perry leans into dark comedy, Presley's voice is rawer and more elegiac, completed by her daughter Riley Keough after Presley's death. Readers who connected with Perry's willingness to document the ugliest chapters of addiction — not just the recovery — will find a deeply resonant companion read here.

A brilliant, obsessive portrait of a childhood friend's mental illness and the systems that failed him — shares Perry's forensic honesty about minds that turn against themselves.

Readers who want to read more after Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing and were most moved by Perry's account of addiction as a disease of the brain will find Jonathan Rosen's The Best Minds a natural next step. Rosen traces the life of his childhood friend Michael Laudor — a Yale-educated prodigy whose schizophrenia spiralled catastrophically despite every institutional intervention available. Like Perry's memoir, the book asks hard questions about why brilliant, high-functioning people fall through the cracks of treatment, and why the systems designed to help so often fail. The writing is similarly self-implicating: Rosen examines his own role as a witness and friend. It's a longer, more investigative read, but anyone shaken by Perry's account of rehab revolving doors will find Rosen's structural critique of mental-health care compellingly parallel.

A memoir of addiction, self-deception, and rebuilding identity from scratch — shares Perry's confessional register but centres recovery as liberation rather than loss.

For readers who liked Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing and are looking for something with a similar confessional energy but a different emotional arc, Glennon Doyle's Untamed is a strong match. Doyle writes openly about bulimia and alcohol dependency, the way addiction masked a deeper failure to live authentically, and the long, non-linear process of choosing sobriety. Like Perry, she is funny, self-aware, and refuses to sanitise the worst of her behaviour. Where Perry's memoir is largely retrospective and tinged with grief for time lost, Doyle's moves toward something more openly hopeful — making it a useful pairing for readers who found Perry's relentless relapse cycles emotionally exhausting but still want the same radical honesty about what addiction actually feels like from the inside.

A life rebuilt after years of self-destruction — shares Perry's structure of charismatic public figure reckoning honestly with a damaging private past to find meaning.

If you're looking for what to read after Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a classic of the same confessional-reckoning tradition. Malcolm X narrates his own descent into crime, drug dealing, and incarceration with the same unflinching first-person accountability Perry brings to addiction. Both men were shaped by trauma they didn't choose, found themselves briefly hollowed out by substances and self-destruction, and then rebuilt a public identity on top of the wreckage. The scale of fame and the specific crises differ enormously, but the structural shape — a life examined without flinching, told by someone who survived it — is strikingly similar. Readers drawn to Perry's radical self-awareness will find Malcolm X's voice equally unsparing and his transformation equally hard-won.