Matthew Perry Told the Truth About Everything

Toward the end of Matthew Perry’s autobiography, he wrote about an encounter in which his mother told him she was proud of him.

“I’d wanted her to say that my whole life,” he wrote. “When I pointed this out she said, ‘What about a little forgiveness?’”

This is the sound of shame perpetuating itself in a family: two people longing for acknowledgment and absolution and answering a direct request for love in that moment with a different request of their own.

Shame is a dominant theme in Mr. Perry’s memoir and, it would seem, in his life. Mr. Perry, to his credit, was determined to break the cycle. “I do forgive you,” he told his mother (and there’s a tone of real surprise in his voice in the audiobook, which he narrates). He writes of how he also forgave his father, who left his mother when he was a baby. And he repeatedly expresses his adoration for close friends, co-stars, lovers and assistants, along with his hopes that they might someday forgive him for everything he put them through as his addiction laid waste to his life.

In fact, the one person Mr. Perry can’t seem to forgive, at least for a majority of his book, is himself. He casts himself as the person who deserves blame for everything that happens. He calls himself selfish and lazy and says that he’s a narcissist who’s also insecure. Even when he’s clinging to life in the hospital with a ruptured colon caused by complications from his opiate addiction, he’s so ashamed that he can barely speak because, as he writes, “my greatest fear had come true, which is that I did this to myself.” He confesses to being humiliated by his good fortune and fame, disgusted that he could have so much and do so little with it. Mr. Perry’s life, by his own telling, seemed to have become, for long stretches, a manifestation of his shame, a guilty burden that he couldn’t live up to.