I ask whether there’s anything more he can add to that.

“Just that it’s going well now. I understand more now. I’m less ruled by fear now. One of the things I learned is I can handle when bad things happen now. I’m resilient, I am strong, and those things should come very clearly to the reader in the book as well. I am a strong man and I never gave myself credit for that, ever. But now I’m slowly starting to.”

Perry will leave Soho House at the end of tonight’s conversation carrying the two portions of sticky toffee pudding—“the best dessert I’ve ever had in my life”—that he is taking back to people waiting at his house. His plan is to watch this year’s The Batman (to his surprise, he has accepted this into his approved Batman canon) for maybe the sixth time, though in the end he’ll settle down with the John Grisham book he’s reading. On the way out, he passes some other guests heading in the opposite direction. In their wake, their muttered words hang in the air.

“It’s Chandler…it’s Chandler…”

“That happens every day,” he says, evidently bristling.

Exactly how Perry feels about the way he’s perceived by the world, it’s not simple. When he says to me at one point, “It’s a very serious book—maybe people will take me more seriously,” I ask him whether he doesn’t think people take him seriously. He gives the following answer, one maybe offering a snapshot of the twisting, turning contortions inside:

“I do, but maybe more so when they hear all this. You know, the Chandler show, the Matthew Perry show, the ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!,’ the song-and-dance man, the guy who’s funny all the time—I don’t have to be that anymore. And I’ve known that for about 10 years. I don’t have to do that. In fact, it’s probably pretty annoying to people, so I don’t do it anymore. I’m funny when I want to be, but I don’t feel the need to be funny.”


A whole other seam of Perry’s book, as signaled by the …Lovers… in its title, relates to the relationships he has had. This, too, often makes for uncomfortable reading. Perry clarifies to me that only once has a partner dumped him, a circumstance he didn’t take too well: “I lit candles in my house and drank and drank and drank over that, for about two years.” Instead, his practiced routine has always been to preempt this possibility by breaking up with people before they can do the same to him, to obviate the rejection he fears will leave him—the word he chooses—“annihilated.”

Perry spells out to me how it goes: “I break up with them because I’m deathly afraid that they will find out that I’m not enough, that I don’t matter, and that I’m too needy, and they’ll break up with me and that will annihilate me and I’ll have to take drugs and that will kill me. That’s why I break up with these wonderful women that have crossed my path. You know, I’m not being dramatic when I say there’s 10 women on the face of the planet that I would kill to be married to. Who I’ve gone out with and broken up with. And now they’ve all moved on, all of them, and are married and have kids. And you’re not supposed to look in the rearview mirror because then you’ll crash your car. But I looked in the rearview mirror and I was like, they’re all gone. They’re all happy, which is great, but I’m the one who’s sitting in a screening room by myself. And there’s no lonelier moment than that.”

Chris Heath

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