No One Told Us Life Was Gonna Be This Way: On Matthew Perry

I was in my teens when Friends became The Biggest Show on TV. I loved his character, but was, of course, oblivious to the details of his struggles behind the scenes or how his story would play out.

I still can’t seem to get Matthew Perry out of my system.

How long has it been since the news of his death? A week? Two?

I’ve read tributes, watched clips. I’m reading his book, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.

There have been a handful of other celebrity deaths that have affected me this way. It’s usually a combination of nostalgia (they felt part of my life) and this ache I sense in them—a mixture of sadness and loneliness and longing. Usually this quality is not the thing they are known for. In Matthew Perry’s case, what made him famous was his brilliant comedic timing and self-deprecating sarcasm. It was the endearing awkwardness and quick wit of Chandler. Later, of course, he also was known for his struggle with alcoholism and addiction.

That part of him interested me too, not because it was a unique story in Hollywood (or life), but because of how honest and vulnerable he was about it.

He felt like people I knew. People I loved. Good people. Flawed people. People I’d watched struggle with addiction. People who went through vicious cycles. People I felt desperate to save. People who often hid all this behind charisma or success or humor or semi-functionality or... something.

Often the sensitivity to life and tragedy are intertwined.

Marilyn Monroe. James Dean. Kurt Cobain. Micheal Jackson. Robin Williams. River Phoenix. Heath Ledger.

Matthew Perry.

Beautiful, tortured souls.

I’m not glorifying them. It’s the combination of their incredible gifts and talents with their profound, flawed humanity (not celebrity) that resonates.

In his book, Matthew Perry writes about what it feels like to be alone and to wonder if you’re even worthy of love. “I need love, but I don’t trust it. If I drop my game, my Chandler, and show you who I really am, you might notice me, but worse, you might notice me and leave me. And I can’t have that. I won’t survive that. Not anymore. It will turn me into a speck of dust and annihilate me.”

That vulnerability.

He writes about his near-death experience and the aftermath, the strange fluctuations of emotion, the gratitude to still be alive with “these scars on my stomach. These broken love affairs. Leaving Rachel. (No not that one. The real Rachel. The ex-girlfriend of my dreams, Rachel.) They haunt me as I lie awake at 4:00 A.M., in my house with a view in the Pacific Palisades. I’m fifty-two.”

Damn. No one told us life was gonna be this way.

I was in my teens when Friends became The Biggest Show on TV. It seemed then that the cast would always be in their twenties and I would always be young too. That’s the nostalgia part. The show—and Chandler—couldn’t BE more ‘90s. I loved his character, but was, of course, oblivious to the details of his struggles behind the scenes or how his story would play out.

“Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one,” John Steinbeck wrote.

Perry did eventually share his secret pain with us, at least some pretty big parts of it, and in the final pages of his book (not ghostwritten, all him), there is a palpable sense of relief and gratitude.

“All artists,” James Baldwin once wrote, “if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”

That’s what his book feels like. A man vomiting the anguish up. A man who has gone through a crucible and come out the other side.

Chandler was part of Matthew Perry, no doubt. (“It wasn’t that I thought I could play Chandler,” Perry writes, “I was Chandler.”) Those performances are hilarious and charming and timeless.

But the man in his book—unfiltered, messy, broken, spiritual, insecure, courageous, curious, self-destructive, resolved to keep going, keep fighting and loving and living—tells the rest of the story.