Why this fearless warrior & writer is my hero

She came of age — hers and ours — before the time of talent-free celebrities, and vacuous self-involved social media stars; before our new age in which emoticons have replaced emotion, when a quick tweet is more important than a work of literature.

Carrie Fisher who died Tuesday, earned her celebrity the hard way: with unlimited talent tempered by tremendous pain. She was known mostly for her ability as an actress — which was great — but I fell in love with her because she was a real writer’s writer.

In fact, all these years later, I still carry in my brain, whole sentences from Fisher’s “Postcards From the Edge,” written in 1987!

She managed, despite battling her personal, yet public demons (that stalked her like a serial killer), to continue to write brilliantly through drugs, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety, conditions which rendered her helpless in so many other ways.

That’s what real writers do, they write through it all: Pain and happiness, misery and joy, love and its horrific polar opposite, indifference.

Fisher put words together — even as her brain was being fried — in ways no one had thought to do before. Brilliant phrases, heartbreaking and often hilarious words that exposed her tortured soul.

In the semi-autobiographical novel, “Postcards,” she wrote that she was so isolated and lonely in her illness and addictions that she’d get excited to hear the little ding a hairdryer makes when it gets shut off. She thought she was hearing a phone and someone was finally calling her. I was floored by that kind of loneliness and the honesty from a person who had become so iconic 10 years earlier. She taught us that fame wasn’t a shield against demons.

It was a particularly dark time in my own life, and I remember how I related to things she had written and I how I learned from them. I had been recently divorced and almost fell over when I read, “Guys are great before you know who they are. . . They’re great when you’re still with who they might be.” Exactly. The mother in the book also reminded me of my own mother, a woman hopeless in the face of her daughter’s pain. “Mom brought me some peanut butter cookies and a biography of Judy Garland,” she wrote.