In the wars
A Carrie Fisher biography charts the complex life of the woman behind Princess Leia.
Carrie Fisher had been dead for three years when she starred in the No 1 movie on the planet. It’s the kind of dark irony Fisher herself would have loved.
A child born into the spotlight whose entire life was about both chasing fame and wrestling with it, Fisher’s posthumous appearance in December’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was the final exclamation mark of her career.
Sheila Weller’s vivid new biography, Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge, serves up plenty of gossip while also painting a compassionate portrait of a complicated woman who fought addiction and mental illness.
Weller, who wrote Girls Like Us (a joint biography of Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon) and has reported on women’s issues for years, shows how Fisher’s writing career, although it never entirely came out of Princess Leia’s shadow, was a cathartic kind of therapy.
The Star Wars movies turned Fisher, a wealthy daughter of Hollywood stars, into an icon at just 20. But barely into her twenties, Fisher was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a condition she ultimately embraced. Talk about mental health is more open now, but when Fisher said in a television interview in 2000, “I am mentally ill”, it was pretty groundbreaking.
Weller relies on a parade of celebrity interviews, and she quotes heavily from both Fisher’s and her mother Debbie Reynolds’ memoirs.
She makes a case that Fisher’s blunt truth telling influenced the #MeToo movement; that after her death her “brand of raunchily self-styled feminism” swept over America. That might be overegging it, but there were an awful lot of Princess Leia signs and costumes to be seen in the Women’s March of 2017, just after her death.
“She was born into a fantasy world … and she fought her way to reality,” Weller writes.
Fisher loved the return to Leia after 37 years in 2015’s The Force Awakens, but toxic fandom tainted what should have been a valedictory lap. “Princess Leia got fat” was one of the kinder comments.
“It used to be that you’re your own worst enemy,” she said in one of her final interviews. “No longer. The internet is.”
A sad pattern sets in in the later parts of A Life on the Edge, as Fisher struggles with her demons. Weller digs up plenty of detail on a wrongful-death lawsuit Fisher faced in her final year over the heroin overdose of a 21-year-old staying in her guest house. She made a lot of bad decisions.
“I can do wrong better than anyone,” Fisher admitted at one point.
Yet Fisher’s voice tends to overwhelm her biographer, who lacks her subject’s Dorothy Parker-esque knack for turning a phrase.
It’s a shame Fisher never lived to write her own full autobiography. The thin memoirs she completed and the fiction that exposed so much of her true self don’t quite sum up her entire life.
Propulsive and filled with Fisher’s quippy wit, A Life on the Edge rises above run-of-the-mill celebrity bios and fills in many of the gaps in her story, but it never quite escapes the gravitational pull of its subject, who spoke so well for herself.