BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — When I pictured Matthew Perry, the actor frequently known as Chandler Bing, I saw him on the tangerine couch at Central Perk or seated on one of the twin recliners in the apartment he shared with Joey Tribbiani.In September, after arriving at his 6,300-square-foot rental house and being ushered through a driveway gate by his sober companion, I sat across from Perry, who perched on a white couch in a white living room, a world away from “Friends,” the NBC sitcom that aired for 10 seasons and catapulted all six of its stars into fame, fortune and infinite memes. Instead of the foosball table where Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross gathered, nudging each other through the first chapters of adulthood, Perry, 53, had a red felt pool table that looked untouched. There was plenty of light in the house, but not a lot of warmth.I have watched every episode of “Friends” three times — in prime time, on VHS and on Netflix — but I’m not sure I would have recognized Perry if I’d seen him on the street. If he was an ebullient terrier in those 1990s-era Must See TV days — as memorable for his full-body comedy as he was for the inflection that made “Can you BE any more [insert adjective]” the new “Gag me with a spoon” — he now seemed more like an apprehensive bulldog, with the forehead furrows to match.As his former co-star Lisa Kudrow confesses in the foreword to his memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” the first question people ask about “Friends” is often “How’s Matthew Perry doing?”Perry answers that question in the book, which Flatiron will publish on Nov. 1, by starkly chronicling his decades-long cage match with drinking and drug use. His addiction led to a medical odyssey in 2018 that included pneumonia, an exploded colon, a brief stint on life support, two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag, more than a dozen stomach surgeries, and the realization that, by the time he was 49, he had spent more than half of his life in treatment centers or sober living facilities.Most of this is covered in the prologue. At one point, he writes in a parenthetical, “Please note: for the next few paragraphs, this book will be a biography rather than a memoir because I was no longer there.”The book is full of painful revelations, including one about short-lived, alcohol-induced erectile dysfunction, and another in which Perry describes carrying his top teeth to the dentist in a baggie in his jeans pocket. (He bit into a slice of peanut butter toast and they fell out, he writes: “Yes, all of them.”)Perry said he had a moment after he recorded his audiobook when he thought, “Oh my God, what a terrible life this person has had!” Then he realized, “Wait a minute, it’s me! I’m talking about me.”Quietly and then, as he relaxed, at a volume that allowed me to stop worrying about my recording device, Perry settled into the conversation about his substance abuse. It started with Budweiser and Andrès Baby Duck wine when he was 14, then ballooned to include vodka by the quart, Vicodin, Xanax and OxyContin. He drew the line at heroin, a choice he credits with saving his life.“I would fake back injuries. I would fake migraine headaches. I had eight doctors going at the same time,” Perry said. “I would wake up and have to get 55 Vicodin that day, and figure out how to do it. When you’re a drug addict, it’s all math. I go to this place, and I need to take three. And then I go to this place, and I’m going to take five because I’m going to be there longer. It’s exhausting but you have to do it or you get very, very sick. I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to feel good. I certainly wasn’t a partyer; I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie. That was heaven for me. It no longer is.”Perry said he had been clean for 18 months, which means that he was newly drug- and alcohol-free when the “Friends” reunion aired in May 2021.“I’ve probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober,” he estimated.Most addicts don’t have Perry’s resources. But they have what he called “the gift of anonymity,” while his bleakest moments have been photographed, chronicled and occasionally mocked. For the record, Perry isn’t a huge fan of secrecy as it pertains to Alcoholics Anonymous, where he sponsors three members. He explained: “It suggests that there’s a stigma and that we have to hide. This is not a popular opinion, by the way.”Perry’s demeanor brightened when we talked about pickleball, his latest obsession. He built a court at the house he’s moving into in the Palisades. He plays with friends and hired pros. He said, “I thought it would be a good idea, to pump myself up, to play pickleball before this interview, but basically I’m about to fall asleep in your lap.”So what inspired him to write a book?After his extended stay in a Los Angeles hospital, Perry started tapping out his life story on the Notes app on his phone. When he hit 110 pages, he showed them to his manager, who told him to keep going. He worked at his dining room table for about two hours a day, no more: “It was hard to face all this stuff.”Perry has written for television (“The Odd Couple,” “Mr. Sunshine”) before but, “writing a book I had not really thought of before,” he said. “Whenever I bumped into something that I didn’t really want to share, I would think of the people that I would be helping, and it would keep me going.”Over the course of the next hour, Perry returned to the idea of helping fellow addicts 15 times. The dedication at the front of the book reads: “For all of the sufferers out there. You know who you are.”He said: “It’s still a day-to-day process of getting better. Every day. It doesn’t end because I did this.”“I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center,” Perry writes.Danny Feld/Warner Bros.The memoir came together without a ghostwriter, which is rare for household-name authors. Megan Lynch, the senior vice president and publisher at Flatiron, said of the proposal she read last year: “There was a real voice to it. It was clear that he was going to share intimate details not just about his time on the show but about his entire life, and that felt revelatory. I’m not working on an assembly line of books by celebrities and it’s something as an editor I want to be very choosy about. For me, this really rose to a level that I do not ordinarily see.”Lynch, who watched “Friends” when she was 14 and credits it with providing a vision for a future life in New York City, added, “Unlike any celebrity that I think anyone has ever worked with, Matthew turned in his manuscript ahead of the deadline.”Although Perry hopes that “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing” will eventually be shelved in the self-help section of bookstores, “Friends” fans will find poignant nuggets in its pages. Perry writes gratefully and glowingly of the 10 seasons he and his co-stars worked together, earning $1 million per episode at their peak.He recalls the time Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer and said, “in a kind of weird but loving way,” that the group knew he was drinking again. “‘We can smell it,’” she said — and, he writes, “the plural ‘we’ hits me like a sledgehammer.” Another time, the cast confronted him in his dressing room.Perry also drops a sad bombshell about his onscreen wedding: “I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center — at the height of my highest point in ‘Friends,’ the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show — in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician.”In a phone interview, Kudrow said: “It’s a hideous disease, and he has a tough version of it. What’s not changing is his will to keep going, keep fighting and keep living.”She added: “I love Matthew a lot. We’re part of a family. I’m basically ending this with ‘I’ll be there for you’ [the ‘Friends’ theme song], but it’s true. I’ll always be there for him.”Perry’s childhood friends Christopher and Brian Murray echoed this sentiment. “He’s gone through more than any human being I know and he’s come out on the good side of it,” said Brian, the older of the two brothers who have known Perry since first grade. Riding bikes around their rural corner of Ottawa, the trio would belt out the theme song from “The Rockford Files” and rib one another in the cadence that Perry later immortalized on “Friends.”“A lot of it was tough to understand,” Christopher said. “You wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Fundamentally, his personality and his heart are absolutely in the same place they were when he was a kid.”“Alcohol really did save me for a while,” Perry said. “Then it didn’t. It’s like your best friend turns to you and goes, Now I’m going to kill you. And then you raise your hand and say, I need help here.”Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesFailed relationships were among the hardest things to write about, Perry said (“I’m lonely, but there’s a couple of people on the payroll to keep me safe”), though he hopes to marry and have children in the future. “I think I’d be a great father,” he said.Eighteen years after “Friends” aired its last episode, Perry is tickled by its staying power, and its popularity among the children of its original viewers. “There are 15-year-old people wandering around, seeing me and wondering why I look so old,” he said.When I mentioned I’d seen a young woman in my hotel gym wearing a “Friends” sweatshirt — you rarely see merch from, say, “E.R.,” which capped off NBC’s Thursday night lineup in the ’90s — he laughed. “You should set me up with that girl,” he said. “Just say, I know this guy, he’s as single as they come.”Perry’s candid, darkly funny book now earns him an honorary folding chair — and shelf space — beside David Carr, Caroline Knapp, Leslie Jamison, Nic Sheff, Sarah Hepola and other authors who have explored the minute-to-minute, tooth-and-nail skirmish of recovery.“There is a hell,” Perry writes. “Don’t let anyone tell you different. I’ve been there; it exists; end of discussion.”He said, “Now I feel better because it’s out. It’s out on a piece of paper. The ‘why’ I’m still alive is definitely in the area of helping people.”

Vuity, taken daily, promises clear vision for up to 10 hours. But does it work?I never set out to become a middle-aged woman known for jazzy eyewear but that’s exactly who I am.Like many 40- and 50-something people, I have presbyopia, a condition that makes it difficult to see what’s right in front of me. Words and people look a little bit smudged around the edges, sometimes to a dizzying degree, like a watercolor painted with a sodden brush.Now, in addition to the contact lenses I’ve worn since sixth grade to correct nearsightedness, I wear reading glasses to keep the close-up world crisp. I own a dozen pairs in all shapes and sizes, with a bias toward big frames in primary colors — think Sally Jessy Raphael, Carrie Donovan and Iris Apfel. I stash glasses in my desk drawer, sock drawer and junk drawer, at the bottom of my bag and in my car, between couch cushions and under a pile of mail, on my bedside table and on top of my head. Still, I can never find a pair when I need one, and I’m never sure what strength I need. It depends on the brand, the quality of the lenses and the brightness of the room where I’m sitting. I read for a living — I’m an editor at The New York Times Book Review — so I need to be able to see words on a page! Clearly!At 38, wearing reading glasses was a fun way to express my individuality and free-spiritedness (or to summon the free spirit I wish I had). At 48, I’ve become so dependent on them, they’ve lost some appeal. I constantly miss texts and emails because I’m on the go and can’t see my phone. Yes, I’ve increased the font size, but sometimes I don’t want my kids to be able to read my screen from across the room.So when I heard about Vuity, a new type of eye drop for people with age-related blurred vision, I was eager to give it a try. From an article in the Times, I learned that “a single Vuity drop in each eye improved trial subjects’ close-range vision for six hours and improved their intermediate vision — important for computer work — for 10 hours,” though each person’s experience will vary.After a quick eye exam, my optometrist gave me a prescription, warning that the drops might not work because I’ve worn reading glasses for so long, my eyes are accustomed to them. She said we could talk about options other than “cheaters” at our next appointment. (I try avoid this word unless I’m referring to the frumpy half-glasses I wear while knitting; it strikes me as the “dungarees” of the eye world.) The only ones I know of are bifocals (now rebranded as progressives) or monovision, where you wear two different types of contact lens — one for seeing close up, one for distance — and let your eyes find a middle ground.Vuity isn’t covered by insurance, since it isn’t considered a medical necessity, so I paid $101.99 at CVS for a bottle about the length of my pinkie finger from knuckle to tip. I’ve swallowed prenatal vitamins that weren’t much smaller. I zipped the drops into the change purse in my wallet and drove home with my 18-year-old son, who thinks my collection of creative eyewear is “mad weird.”Sitting on the couch in my living room, I put one drop in each eye, as directed by my doctor. Nothing happened, which wasn’t surprising; I knew my eyeballs needed a bit of time to marinate. Miracles take time.Each day, Ms. Egan chooses from her wide selection of reading glasses. “I try to mix it up,” she said.Desmond Picotte for The New York TimesFig Newton, the writer’s 12-year-old terrier mix, thought a bottle of Vuity might make a nice snack.Desmond Picotte for The New York TimesAbout 20 minutes later, I was waiting for my 14-year-old daughter in the parking lot outside her dance studio, I got a text from my husband at home. It said, “Fig got your eye drops. I think I rescued them, but I’m not sure.” Fig Newton is our incorrigible 12 year-old terrier mix, who has a taste for cardboard, plastic and non-potable liquids.I felt twin flashes of annoyance and concern, then the thunderclap of an epiphany: I was reading my texts without glasses! In a dark car! I could see the full palette of emojis, right down to stripes on the zebra and holes in the Swiss cheese.It wasn’t exactly the moment when the Velveteen Rabbit realizes he’s real, but it still felt momentous.That night, in the bright warmth of our dining room, I realized my texts were fuzzy again. I knew the drops could wear off in a matter of hours, and you can only use them once a day. But I still held my phone, then a book, at an arm’s length, exacerbating my double chin, not wanting to surrender to glasses. I felt like Charlie in “Flowers for Algernon,” slowly reverting back to my old self.To make matters worse, the whites of my eyes had a pink tinge. Picture Campbell’s tomato soup when you add an extra can of milk. My 20-year-old daughter assured me I did not look high: “But your eye bags are bigger than usual,” she said.The next morning, I put in the drops as soon as I woke up. This time, I waited the recommended 10 minutes before popping in my contacts. I had not been able to read the microscopic instructions the first go-round, so missed that detail. For someone as nearsighted as I am (my lens prescription is -9.50 in each eye), with an outdated pair of regular glasses, this extra time would have been worthwhile had Vuity worked as promised. It didn’t.Not only did my eyes retain their bloodshot, rheumy cast during the five days I used the drops, my close-up vision never improved significantly enough to make reading glasses redundant. The drops burned as they went in, too. I’m not talking about an acid kind of pain, more like a lash in your eye, but still unpleasant.Vuity did come in handy when I walked Fig within a few hours of taking a dose. I could pause on a corner, peek at my phone and make sense of what I saw without fumbling around in my pocket for a pair of glasses that would fog up the instant they touched my skin.But overall, the drops did not pull their weight enough to justify spending approximately $3 per day for a 30-day supply. And they most certainly did not offer the extended clarity I need when I’m reading. I kept giving the drops another chance until it occurred to me that I’d never revisit a toothpaste that gave me bad breath or a moisturizer that made me itch.One of the best perks of middle age is perspective: You see things as they’re meant to be seen, whether they’re right in front of you or not. Wisdom provides the gift of clarity, even if your corneas and pupils don’t behave the way they’re supposed to. That gray hair, those eye bags? They’re my stripes, earned with the help of time, worry, tears and smiles, plus a little boost from genetics. For now, I’ll continue to accessorize myself with the biggest, brightest, weirdest glasses I can find.