The Sad Truth About Matthew Perry’s Childhood

Following his father’s abrupt move to California in search of acting gigs, Matthew Perry and his mother, Suzanne Perry (née Langford), were left to pick up the pieces. “Mom and I were both abandoned, in fact, before we’d even gotten the chance to know each other,” he wrote in his memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.” Perry described himself as a “latchkey kid” and said his single mother was often distracted and stressed due to the nature of her job as Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s press secretary. Perry wrote that he often resorted to making her laugh to grab her attention. “I learned to be funny (pratfalls, quick one-liners, you know the drill) because I had to be,” he wrote. “And me being funny tended to calm her down enough that she would cook some food, sit down at the dinner table with me, and hear me out, after I heard her out, of course.”

Alas, Suzanne wasn’t a single mother for long. In 1981, she wed Keith Morrison. Perry was 12 years old at the time. And while he is adamant that he and his stepfather had an excellent relationship, he still often felt himself vying for his mother’s attention. “All I wanted was for her to turn around and, you know, focus on me and like be with me,” he confessed during an interview with Tom Power. “And uh, she never really did that.”