The honesty of Carrie Fisher

You could liken her to Dorothy Parker, as many have, though Parker’s work is musty in comparison to Fisher’s, which reads like a fresh slap of weirdness.

Oh, Carrie Fisher, gone way too soon.

A suggestion to grieving admirers: Honor her not by watching her movies again, but by reading her books.

These are works where misery and brilliance commingle with amazing wit, the creations of an actual person who had many layers and is worth getting to know, as opposed to Princess Leia, who has none and is not.

Anyone could have predicted that a little girl whose mom and dad were Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher would grow up with an abundance of, let’s call them issues, and that perhaps these might lead to a life involving alcohol and drugs, and detox and rehab.

All of which happened to Fisher, repeatedly and in profusion.

But who would have predicted that this product of Hollywood inbreeding - Fisher called herself that - would have turned celebrity dysfunction into such a memorable body of writing?

Her semi-autobiographical novel Postcards From the Edge, and memoirs like Wishful Drinking and Shockaholic, are hilarious, bluntly beautiful and deserve as much lasting recognition as her contributions to the ‘‘Star Wars’’ franchise.

You could liken her to Dorothy Parker, as many have, though Parker’s work is musty in comparison to Fisher’s, which reads like a fresh slap of weirdness.

And when she wrote about depression and addiction, she had a humaneness and directness that feel honest.

Like her description of bipolar disorder:

‘‘Imagine having a mood system that functions essentially like the weather - independently of whatever’s going on in your life.

‘‘So the facts of your life remain the same, just the emotional fiction that you’re responding to differs.

‘‘It’s like I’m not properly insulated.’’

When she eventually turned to shock therapy, it ‘‘punched the dark lights out of my depression,’’ she wrote.

‘‘It did for me what drugs had done for me.

‘‘It was like a mute button muffling the noise of my shrieking feelings.

‘‘Your whole life you hear about this terrifying treatment that turns you into a vegetable, only to finally find out that it had all the charming qualities of no big deal.

‘‘Sort of like getting your nails done, if your nails were in your cerebral cortex.’’

Let others remember Fisher for her skills with a blaster, blasting storm troopers, and for her hairdos and her wisecracks that were George Lucas’ idea of witty (‘‘Would somebody get this big walking carpet out of my way?’’).

Here’s to what Fisher created on her own.

Her idiosyncratic way of writing about how she struggled with her mind, her memory, her compulsions, her weight:

‘‘What I didn’t realize, back when I was this twenty-five-yearold pinup for geeks in that me myself and iconic metal bikini, was that I had signed an invisible contract to stay looking the exact same way for the next thirty to forty years.

‘‘Well, clearly I’ve broken that contract.’’ And here’s to her honesty: ‘‘I heard someone once say we’re only as sick as our secrets,’’ Fisher wrote in Wishful Drinking.

‘‘If that’s true, then this book will go a long way to rendering me amazingly well.’’

New York Times