Matthew Perry

A few thoughts from the edge of the canyon.

Last Saturday night, I found out about Matthew Perry’s death while scrolling Instagram in bed. I whisper-shouted, FUUUUUCK, and send a screenshot to my fiancé.

This news hit amid another torrent of impossibly difficult news; just last week, the war in the Middle East escalated, the deadliest mass shooting of the year happened in Maine, and my mom visited the site of her burned-down home—her only home, not a vacation or rental property—in Maui for the first time. We’re past the point of digesting the sheer volume of horror happening right now, and I’m not one to get despondent about the world often, but I’ve been touching that place lately.

Before I get to it, some throat clearing…

I’m conscious of choosing to write about this versus any number of other things happening in the world right now and how that might look. So I’ll take this as an opportunity to say I don’t subscribe to the idea that everyone with a platform should make a public statement about every big public issue. It’s impossible to do, of course, but I see it as unhelpful at best and dangerous at worst. I’ve accepted I’ll never write publicly about most things, even if it would benefit me personally to do so, and even if many people want me to or think I should, because 1) I don’t know enough about most things, and 2) the vast majority of genuine processing, critical thinking, and action in my life take place privately (which is the case for everyone, whether we admit it or not) and it’s best that way.

Addiction is central to my work and my personal story, so Matthew Perry’s story hits close to home. Despite thinking I was going to write a totally different, lighter email when I woke up today, when I opened up a new draft in Substack, I found I wanted to write about him. So here we are.

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Reading Matthew Perry’s memoir felt like holding my breath underwater for too long.

I read it fast, within a couple of days, and at about three-quarters of the way through, I started skimming. I needed oxygen: signs of hope, signs of recovery. When I flipped to the end and read the last two chapters, I slammed my Kindle into my comforter and texted a friend. I said I hated the book. I. HATED. IT., I wrote in caps.¹

There are so many reasons to dislike a book, ninety-nine percent of which are irrelevant to the author, even if it’s a memoir. I didn’t just dislike his book, though; I had a visceral reaction to it. It made me angry. I thought about it for weeks. It made me want to scream about it to everyone who would listen, and I did. I had hunches about why then, but they were only surface things; now I understand the deeper reason.

Still, at the time, despite whatever complicated reaction I had, I knew he’d probably done a lot of people a huge service by writing the book and I respected that he did it knowing how much it must have cost him emotionally. I adored him in Friends, as so many did, and I appreciated the gifts he gave the world and the light he wrested from all that darkness. Above all, I wished for him what every person who’s struggled with acute addiction wishes for one of their own: freedom from hell. I don’t know for sure, but I felt he was still there when I read the book, or perhaps somewhere in between, and I wished him out. I wished him peace.

What I understand now is that my intense reaction came from the fear of what lives inside of me, too—of what was and is still possible for me, too—on the other side of an invisible line.

It’s nearly impossible to describe addiction to someone who hasn’t been there, and it’s equally impossible to describe what it’s like to be in recovery. Because it’s not as though once you’re sober, you join the world and live like everyone else; you don’t. In recovery, you are both more alive and closer to death than other people all the time because your particular plot of land, the place where you live, is affixed to the edge of a canyon. If you lose sight of that fact for too long or at the wrong time—which is easier to do than it should be—you risk falling in. This is just the truth of it.

But it gets worse.

The reason I couldn’t bear Matthew’s story then and the reason his death punched me in the gut so hard is because of this: sometimes people fall into the canyon for reasons nobody can predict or understand or prevent.

I’ve known people who did all the right things, made as earnest an effort as they could possibly make to get and stay sober, had beautiful things to stay sober for, wanted sobriety with their whole being, were loved and supported and well-resourced, and even stayed sober for long stretches of time, but ultimately still fell. I’m not referring to Matthew’s death here; I’m referring to his life. The story I read in his memoir was one of a man falling into a too-deep, too-hard canyon too many times. He may have been stone sober when he died, even sober for a long while, but I would bet my life that his addiction is still what killed him, even if it technically didn’t.

When I talked to non-sober people about his book, they loved it. They thought he was a hero. When I talked to people in recovery about it, they were scared by it. They thought he seemed unwell. Exactly one year ago, last November, we chose it as our book of the month in The Luckiest Club. A large part of the discussion centered around this collective feeling of fear that he wasn’t okay. I recognize how that may be perceived as judgmental or patronizing, but it wasn’t. It was just the perception from a community of people who live life on the edge of the canyon, too.

If you’re someone in recovery who feels unusually impacted by his death, you’re not alone. It makes sense. It makes perfect sense. As a friend pointed out, we’ve never had a celebrity (or even a non-celebrity) publish an addiction memoir and die one year later. It hits.

From the bottom of my heart, I hope you rest in peace, Matty. May your soul be free. May your soul be free.

Love,
Laura

You are reading Love Story, a weekly newsletter about relationships, recovery, and writing from Laura McKowen. I’m also on Instagram, and have written two books. I love engaging with you in the comments, which are open to paid subscribers, and you can subscribe here or give a gift subscription here.

1. I did go back and read the parts I’d skipped.