The death of Matthew Perry on Oct. 28 came against a backdrop of unsettling global turmoil. The actor, best known as one of the starring sextet of "Friends," the hugely popular sitcom that ran for 10 years and ended in 2004, prompted a wave of online mourning that was notably conflicted: Some straightforwardly lamented the loss while others questioned how anyone (including themselves) could express grief at one actor's passing as horrific headlines and images unfurled every day. |
In some sense, this gulf may be generational, given that "Friends" ended nearly 20 years ago — though the show famously enjoys an enduring, even perplexing, popularity with young viewers. We also often struggle to explain or reconcile the unusually intimate parasocial relationships we have with artists whose works are meaningful to us but whose personal lives we don't know very well, if at all. |
But Perry presents a notable exception, since his offscreen tribulations with addiction were extensively and honestly documented, primarily by him in his candid memoir, "Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing," published in 2022. |
With celebrities, especially TV stars who have been beamed and streamed for years into our living rooms, we often feel a false sense of connection. We may think we know them but, of course, we only know the characters they played. Perry was different: He made no secret of (and seemingly kept no secrets about) the many issues he faced in his private life. The result is that, weirdly, we did kind of know him, in all of his brokenness, because he wanted us to. It was an act of generosity — as it turns out, one of his last. |
We owe it to Perry, then, as Heather Havrilesky argues in a moving guest essay published yesterday, to really listen to what he was trying to tell us. Shame is a recurring — perhaps the recurring — motif in his memoir: an addict's shame, the kind that can be all-consuming, or at least lead to self-defeating, destructive behaviors. |
We're conditioned to regard celebrity addiction narratives as cautionary tales that we, the public, observe in fascinated horror. Havrilesky asks we do something more: look for ourselves in his story. Not all of us have faced addiction, and certainly very few if any of us can understand the levels of fame and monetary success that Perry attained. But his central struggles are ones nearly everyone can identify with, and learn from, if we choose to let ourselves see ourselves in his story. |
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