This book gave me a headache. I love reading memoirs. A time to find out someone’s backstory and hear inner thoughts you normally wouldn’t. I watched friends as a teen, so being in my 30s now, looking back at how things age, it worries me the way Perry talks about women. Especially the ones he’s been with. It’s not healthy and honestly worrisome in terms of women have experienced their encounters with him.

Addiction is horrible. It goes against rhyme and reason, and makes family and friends feel hopeless. Someone’s narcissism and all-around self-important arrogance is not all stemming from addiction. There is so much trauma stored inside Perry and it manifests as projections against people he feels have deserted or abandoned him.

The insecurities that result in Perry affirmations about himself are dizzying.

Listened as an audiobook and LOVED that he’s the one actually reading it! Heartbreaking to know how it all ends, but still an enlightening tale of his life and the impact his family had

Such a heartbreaking memoir, made even more devastating to listen to his voice posthumously in the audiobook. He was personable and genuine in his vocal storytelling, and it was also sad to hear how much the cadence and timbre of his voice have deteriorated from the effects of drugs and alcohol abuse. He also at times, sounded arrogant, misogynistic, and kinda narcissistic...I had an ebb and flow of empathy (which I felt guilty about since I'm listening to this after his death.)
This rating is solely for the writing - which was not great. I lost interest towards the end from how repetitive the structure of the storytelling became, to the point that exact phrasing was repeated countless times throughout the book, sometimes even in one chapter (we get it, you were on the number one tv show in America.) I realize he used some mechanisms to reiterate just how terrible many situations were, I just wish he had a ghost writer or someone to help him pull more nuance out of the words. I am glad I listened to the audiobook specifically; it held a lot more power to hear it directly told by him. I might have given up if I read the physical book.

I can only hope he has found peace and rest after such a tumultuous battle with the disease of addiction.

“No secret gets worse just because it has been told. At this point in my life, the words of gratitude pour out of me because I should be dead, and yet somehow I am not. There must be a reason for that. It’s simply too hard for me to understand if there isn’t. I don’t believe in half-assing things anymore. The path of least resistance is boring, and scars are interesting—they tell an honest story, and they are proof that a battle was fought, and in my case, hard-won. I have many scars now.”

I struggled with the time line, or lack there of, with the book. A lot of the times things were sequential and then it would jump around. Other things kept being repeated and that was hard to keep pushing through.
I appreciated how candid he was and sharing his struggles. As Friends lover, learning more about this side of the person behind the character was interesting