One of my friends from high school texted me on the day Matthew Perry died, as soon as she heard the news. We grew up with Friends, given that the show was first released when I was in the eighth grade. And my friends and I… well… could we BE any more obsessed with the show? So, to say that I was sad to hear about the loss of Matthew Perry is an understatement.
My friend recommended Perry’s memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (Flatiron Books, 2022) to me, and I immediately put the audiobook version on hold at the library which actually allowed me to get ahead of the queue that formed once the news of Perry’s death spread.*
What I had not anticipated in reading Perry’s memoir was the inclusion of religious aspects to his story. I knew about his struggles with addiction—what he calls the “Big Terrible Thing”—though I didn’t know how “devastating” (my friend’s word, not mine) his struggles were. I also knew that Alcoholics Anonymous has a spiritual component to it, but of course not having experienced those struggles myself, I didn’t really expect any sense of spirituality or religious belief to appear in Perry’s memoir. I knew Perry more as Chandler Bing than I did as a religious person. But there is a spiritual sense in there. This book is not, in any sense, a spiritual autobiography like the ones that I’ve read and studied in the past, but you do find an underlying religious belief that comes through the text.
First and foremost, Perry has a clear sense of divine providence, though he doesn’t use this language explicitly always. The central theme of divine providence in one’s life was common in the autobiographies of the early modern era, especially my area of study of seventeenth-century France. The idea of divine providence in that period that I study showed that the primary agency over one’s life should be attributed to God, not the author (see Elissa Cutter, “Apology in the Form of Autohagiography: Angélique Arnauld’s Defense of Her Reform of Port-Royal,” Catholic Historical Review, vol. 105, no. 2, 2019, p. 296). Perry’s use of this theme is different, though it does still provide a sense of the way in which some events that occurred in his life were out of his control. For example, he introduces the section where he talks about getting the part on Friends with the comment, “You know how sometimes the universe has plans for you that are hard to believe, how the world wants something for you even though you’ve done your best to close off that avenue? Welcome to my 1994” (p. 79). At that time, he was committed to a show called L.A.X. 2194 about futuristic baggage handlers at LAX and as much as he wanted to put his name in for Friends, was unable to do so. So, at this point in the narrative, he describes the “universe” as having some control over his life, moving him toward something that he is meant to do. Elsewhere in the text he uses a similar metaphor, talking about how “the stars were lining up again” (p. 147) as he waited for a call back about a lead in The Whole Nine Yards (2000) with Bruce Willis. Later in the narrative, however, he names this figure that has control over his life explicitly as God. For example, he comments that he struggled with the thoughts, “Is this why I got sober? To sleep with women? And then hurt them? Surely God had something better in store for me than that” (p. 143). And while that might seem to some like a throwaway line, it still rests on the underlying belief that God has a plan for his life. So, in Perry’s memoir, we see, first, an understanding of God as someone who is involved with human lives and has an ultimate plan for where they should go. He sees God’s presence in having spared him from his addiction-induced near deaths (p. 197) and similarly as placing challenges in front of him that would lead him in the way God ultimately wants him to God (p. 233).
The second spiritual element that struck me in Perry’s memoir is that, according to his account, he had a clear sense of God’s presence in his life, one that is connected especially to a mystical experience that occurred in his kitchen—of all places! At this point in the story he is waiting, urgently, to get some detox medication, and he prays. He says, “I frantically began to pray—with the desperation of a drowning man. The last time I’d prayed, right before I’d gotten Friends, I’d managed only to strike a Faustian bargain with a God who had simply drawn a long breath and bided his damn time. Here I was, more than a decade later, chancing my praying arm once again” (p. 158–9). The previous time he prayed, that he references here, he asked God to make him famous, saying that God “can do whatever you want” to him in exchange for that fame (p. 81). I think many of us might tend to be a bit “judgy” of that prayer, but he does admit that this was something he had never done before that point. And it does seem that Perry identifies this moment as the root of many of his struggles. Later, he comments, “He was about to keep one half of the bargain—but this also meant he could do whatever he wanted with me as the other half. I was completely at the mercy of a God who was sometimes merciful, and sometimes thought it was perfectly fine to put his own son on a fucking cross” (p. 98–99). This quote stands out to me in part because it reflects the dual experiences that Perry had with God in his life—both a sense of mercy and a sense of abandonment, especially at one’s lowest point.
Back, however, to his experience in the kitchen—this time Perry did not pray for fame, rather he prayed for God’s help, and he includes a beautiful description of what he experienced in response to that prayer:
As I prayed, the little wave in the air transformed into a small, golden light. As I kneeled, the light slowly began to get bigger, and bigger, until it was so big that it encompassed the entire room. It was like I was standing on the sun. I had stepped on the surface of the sun. What was happening? And why was I starting to feel better? And why was I not terrified? The light engendered a feeling more perfect than the most perfect quantity of drugs I had ever taken. Feeling euphoric now, I did get scared and tried to shake it off. But there was no shaking this off. It was way way bigger than me. My only choice was to surrender to it, which was not hard, because it felt so good. The euphoria had begun at the top of my head and slowly seeped down through my entire body—I must have sat there for five, six, seven minutes, filled with it.
Perry, p. 159
I think it’s interesting to note some of the language that Perry uses for this experience. First, he describes the experience as rooted in a “golden light” that gave him a feeling of both calm and euphoria. There was a sense of fear at one point in the experience, but he ultimately had to give in and surrender himself to the experience. Later, he describes it as “the presence of love and acceptance” (p. 159).
Perry explicitly identifies this experience as an experience of God. He was able to stay sober for two years based on this experience alone (p. 160). I appreciate that he admits that at times he has his doubts about the experience—whether this was really something mystical or just an aspect of his addiction-fueled illness—but, when he was sober, he understood it as an experience of God’s presence (p. 161).
What interested me most about this experience that Perry had was that at the same time I was listening to the audiobook of his memoir, I was reading Elizabeth A. Dreyer’s Accidental Theologians: Four Women Who Shaped Christianity (Franciscan Media, 2014), who has a chapter on Hildegard of Bingen where she mentions Hildegard’s visions that she had of the “living light.” While Dreyer notes that some scholars have speculated that the visions that Hildegard had may have been the result of severe migraines (Dreyer, p. 24), she also connects Hildegard’s experience to that of the Holy Spirit. Dreyer explains, “She used the Latin term lux vivens or ‘living light’ to describe the dynamic presence within her that also penetrated every aspect of creation. The tradition has consistently named this ongoing divine presence in history, Holy Spirit” (Dreyer, p. 33). In a letter from 1175 to Guibert of Gembloux, Hildegard explained the experiences she had of this “living light,” saying:
The light which I see is not confined to one place, but it is far, far brighter than a cloud which carries the sun; nor can I gauge its height or length or breadth, and it is known to me by the name of the ‘reflection of the living light.’ And just as the sun, the moon and the stars appear in the waters, so the Scriptures, sermons and virtues and certain works that humans have wrought, shine on me brightly in this light.
as quoted in the introduction to Hildegard of Bingen: Selected Writings, Penguin Books, 2001, p. xx
Perry’s experience surprisingly echoes some of this language—the idea of the expansiveness of the light and the comparison to the brightness of the sun, for example. And, listening to Perry’s memoir while also reading Dreyer’s chapter on Hildegard, I definitely saw a connection between these two experiences.
Perry’s memoir returns to this experience that he had in the kitchen several times, which I think shows the significance of the experience for him. He described the experience as an experience of love and that I think is the most important message to get from Perry’s description. Toward the end of the memoir, he says, “God is always there for me now, whenever I clear my channel to feel his awesomeness. It’s hard to believe, given everything, that he still shows up for us mortals, but he does, and that’s the point: love always wins” (p. 249). It’s this experience of divine love, of course, but also—importantly—the experience of love that we have for each other. Perry talks about the way he felt the experience of God not only in this experience he had in the kitchen, of course, but also in helping other people get sober as well (p. 161, 197). Remember, “No one has ever seen God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us” (1 John 4:12). I think that if we take one spiritual message away from Perry’s life and experiences, it is the need for us all to love each other because it is in the love we have for each other that we really experience the love of God.
As Perry said, “I’ve seen God in my kitchen, of all places, so I know there’s something bigger than me. … I know it’s an omnipresent love and acceptance that means that everything’s going to be OK. I know something happens when you die. I know you move on to something wonderful” (p. 225). I sincerely hope that Perry has found the peace and freedom that he so desperately needed.
* I actually finished the audiobook by the second week in November but had to then get into another library queue to get a physical copy of the book so I could write this post. Personally, I really enjoyed listening to the audiobook—as I often do with memoirs—because it was read by Perry himself and you really get a personal sense in the telling of the story.
WIT 