“If you like, you can consider what you’re about to read to be a message from the beyond, my beyond,” writes the late Friends star Matthew Perry in his memoir “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.” Perry recently passed away in his pool in his backyard at age 54, and his book serves as an excellent, raw, crystal-clear window into his struggles with addiction, love and fame throughout his life.

NBC’s hit show Friends was Perry’s claim to fame in the 1990s, starring as the quick-witted New York City-based statistician Chandler Bing.

As the world knows him by his character, (as he alludes to on the first page, saying, “Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name,”) Chandler’s outward portrayal of lightheartedness and whimsy was quite similar to that of Perry. However, Perry used laughter as a mask to hide his own problem: addiction.

Perry writes that he had his first cigarette at 10 years old and his first drink at 13. Those were his first addictive substances by choice, that is; his parents would give him phenobarbital, a barbiturate, to make him sleep when he cried as an infant. His parents were divorced when he was a baby and his father abandoned him for the early part of his childhood, and it took a toll on his yearning for a crutch.

The painful stories he shared in his memoir like this one is the first he ever spoke about them, as his Friends co-star and close real friend Lisa Kudrow said in the book’s Foreword, “He was keeping it a secret. And it took some time for him to feel comfortable enough to tell us some of what he was going through.” She even went as far as to say that while she saw him almost every day for 10 years, “This book is the first time I’m hearing what living with and surviving his addiction really was… He’s now letting us into Matthew’s head and heart in honest and very exposed detail.”

Perry goes out of his way to explain that “no secret gets worse just because it’s told” and that helped him come forward in admitting his journey to the world.

However, his comedic prowess does make an appearance a few times throughout the memoir. Perry says, “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suggest Chandler Bing transformed the way America spoke.” His unique sarcastic delivery of “Could she be any more out of my league?” or “Could I be more sorry?” had swept the nation during the show’s success, and he says it was developed with his friends in third grade and never seemed to leave his vocabulary.

Friends has been immortalized as one of the funniest sitcoms in history, yet due to this memoir we can see that it was recorded all while its most comedic star was under the gun of what he calls “Pain.” He capitalizes “Pain” throughout the book, claiming “This was the worst Pain I’ve ever experienced.”

Perry’s beautifully articulate cadence proved wonders on set, and even more special on the tip of his pen. You can pick up the book for $30 at retailers like Amazon or Target and bookstores like Barnes & Noble.