I'd been waiting to read Matthew Perry'shonest memoir, both because paperbacks save space and because, well, that's it, and I wasn't ready for the end yet.
Sometimes I think God, if there is as Supreme a Being as to
be accounting for all move humans make, can be a dick. Not only for the difficult things I’ve been
stuck with or the friends I have lost before their times but for sticking
people with addictions and not offering full-on cures. As I read Matty Perry’s
memoir(could we *be* on a more-first-name basis? I think anyone who has, at
bottom, such a low self-opinion as well as an iron-clad conviction that the
road not taken is the right one, could well have been one of my favorite friends
as well as my favorite Friend) I found myself also thinking of Tommy Raskin,
and how his family had everything to throw at his depression, probably in ways
most people do not, and they still couldn’t keep Tommy from suicide. Probably
everything is more complicated than it looks, but it does seem, in this, as in
so many areas, that our culture is out of ideas. Hospitalization for depression or in-patient drug rehabilitation have, respectively, saved a lot of people, but
it seems to me that follow-up when people get home? Might not be as strong as
it needs to be. People can’t stay shut away forever.(Which insight might put me
on a par with abled people who kind of
sag with relief when they hear the ADA was passed, if not that they have to do
something to make it happen, quite frankly, but I admit it, and will learn more
in the future.) Have to admit that my early fascination with addiction memoirs has
always been the combination of stories with more bodily functions than mine—as in
other things, Perry here does not disappoint—yikes, in fact--combined with “looking
fine.” My teenaged self-needed to know that there were a lot of ways of being
broken and a lot of ways out of being broken, too. I never found my way out either, though. I'm still here, unlike Matty. Sometimes I really do wonder why, even though I'm not the instrument of my own destruction in quite the same way addicts can be.
What makes God a dick is that, Perry, seems so close to really understanding things about his life and what matters(as well as what might have gone wrong with “Studio 60”) and he didn’t get much of a chance to put those ideas into practice before his untimely, accidental death. I can almost hear Chandler Bing’s voice in my head as I turn the pages saying “So close!” and it’s both a happy and sad feeling. Happy for being so familiar, sad because, after this there will be, to my knowledge, at least, no new words coming from it. I watched most of what he did, even the ones that didn’t last. Even the movies that he might have been some of the unwitting best parts of—it makes sense that he would be hard on himself about some of that, but I still looked up in surprise sometimes. I have a friend who was also a fan who died at the same time. I hope that Matty would understand why I sometimes imagine them together during that big, over-hyped blackout night enjoying the momentary perfection of an eternal stick of gum.
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