CARRIE FISHER THE PRINCESS DIARIST
Hilarious, raw, self-mocking and constantly surprising – both Carrie Fisher and her final book
Carrie Fisher isn’t Princess Leia. There’s so much more to her than that. There may be an alternate universe where Carrie Fisher starred in the original Star Wars trilogy, then fell off the Hollywood radar and lived the rest of her life as “the woman who played Princess Leia”.
Not in our universe. In this universe Carrie Fisher – perhaps accidentally, perhaps not – became something much bigger than a sci-fi princess: she became Carrie Fisher. It wasn’t easy and there was a lot of pain and hardship along the way but she emerged as something unique; a clever, sassy, outrageously funny, insightfully analytical, often unflinchingly honest writer and media personality whom everybody wanted on their TV show. The world loved her for it. Especially when she responded to questions about losing weight to play Leia again with, “Yes, and I think that’s a stupid conversation.”
A pie-chart of what went into creating Carrie Fisher would be a thing of crazy beauty. She was the celebrity daughter of Hollywood stars Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, whose divorce shortly after her birth meant she was in the spotlight from day one. She was the starlet who hated to look at her own face on screen. She was a celebrity wife, briefly married to singer Paul Simon, after turning down a proposal from Dan Aykroyd. She was an accomplished script doctor. She was a critically acclaimed author of four novels, adapting her own book into the Meryl Streepstarring film Postcards From The Edge. She was a drug addict and bipolar – problems she discussed in public openly and candidly. She was an inspirational spokesperson about mental health issues. “I now get awards all the time for being mentally ill,” she once said. “It’s better than being bad at being insane, right? How tragic would it be to be runner-up for Bipolar Woman of the Year?” All of which she channelled into her work. And especially
The Princess Diarist, which sees Fisher at her most witty, shocking, raw and self-analytical. Part memoirs of her time on Star Wars, accompanied by extracts from a diary she kept at the time, it’s no mere list of on-set anecdotes. It’s a tragicomic account of a girl, barely out of her teens, falling for an older – married – man (yes, it’s Harrison Ford), and barely able to process the emotions raging through her.
It leaves many questions unanswered. Questions she would no doubt have loved artfully avoiding on chat shows had she not passed away at the end of 2016. But by the end, for all her hang-ups, you’re left feeling that, overall, she liked being Carrie Fisher. And that being Leia sometimes was cool too.
The acclaimed The Princess Diarist is out now in paperback.