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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
Help her, Obi-Wan! Carrie Fisher's memoir of her life as a "Star Wars" icon and poster child for rehab and mental illness will likely make you laugh -- and cry.
By Rebecca Traister
Read more: Books, Star Wars, Memoirs, Addiction, Mental Illness, Reviews, Book reviews, Rebecca Traister
Dec. 3, 2008 | When most adult Americans say, "I grew up with Carrie Fisher," they probably mean that they grew up with Princess Leia, secret Skywalker and metal bikini-clad royalty from the former planet of Alderaan. In her new book, "Wishful Drinking," Fisher recalls the man who approached her in a store to inform her unabashedly that he thought about her "four times a day" from the time he was 12 to the time he was 22. In Fisher's typically arid appraisal of this encounter, she chides herself for not asking, "What happened at twenty-two?"
So, yes, Fisher's reputation, which was first made when she was a toddler whose father, Eddie Fisher, left her mother, Debbie Reynolds, for a grieving Elizabeth Taylor, rests largely now on her role as space-aged geek goddess, or her later identity as a poster child for bipolar disorder and drug addiction.
But for me, Fisher will always be an author, whose clutch of novels helped shepherd me through adolescence, showing me, with teeming neurotic energy, what it might be like to grow into a woman with a hell of a lot on her mind.
Fisher's fictional oeuvre was built on a precarious arc of sanity; it is itself a miniature work of manic art, starting in 1987 (when Fisher was 31) with "Postcards From the Edge," a splashy, starry rehab roman à clef with a hefty dose of mother-daughter showbiz tsuris. Then came 1990's neurotic romance-stalker book about the end of a difficult marriage, "Surrender the Pink," written with dizzy confidence and flair. Fisher followed that with a loopier, baffling pregnancy novel, "Delusions of Grandma," in 1993. Most recently, after an 11-year writing pause, came "The Best Awful," a chronicle of mental illness whose patchy construction told readers more about the author's emotional state than the plot did.
Fisher is a language obsessive, a nimble verbal acrobat who puns and somersaults around a page with glee. She also casts a crinkled, laughing eye on every occasion, opening her first book with the line, "Maybe I shouldn't have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares, my life is over anyway." In "Surrender the Pink," her heroine Dinah walks the streets of New York with a friend during a mega-blizzard, accepting a ride from a stranger by saying, with jolly self-awareness, "Welcome to our anecdote!" Distance from the narrative of her own life, and the lives of her characters, which characterizes much of her fiction, perhaps is symptomatic of something more troubling that is summed up in the last line of "Surrender the Pink": "Nothing's ever really over. Just over there."
What made Fisher's books so appealing to me as a teenager was the way she used that critical distance from herself to dump the contents of her head and heart on a table and perform a cool, caustic, curious dissection of what was knocking around inside.
It was oddly reassuring that, despite the exceptional circumstances of her life -- the celebrity parents, the Hollywood upbringing, her fame as Princess Leia -- Fisher drew characters who were familiar and recognizable to a confused teenage girl, whose own brain burbled with anxiety and ambition and self-doubt and some good-humored cynicism. Fisher was a movie star who nevertheless wrote about women flummoxed by sex; and though she regularly circulated at Hollywood dinner parties, she could perfectly describe the muddy embarrassment of social ineptitude.
Perhaps because I came to her early, with the devotion of an adolescent reader, I assumed I would follow Fisher anywhere. But as her work has progressed further and further into bipolarity and addiction, I have had to ask: Would I follow her over the precipice?
No, as it turns out, I wouldn't. Or can't. Or don't want to. "Wishful Drinking," the adaptation of Fisher's recent one-woman show about her tipsy-turvy life, is her first foray into official nonfiction, and it retreads much of the terrain she's already covered in her novels. If you are a fan of Fisher's fiction, a follower of her mental illness or simply a looky-loo stargazer curious about her Hollywood heritage, "Wishful Drinking" will likely make you laugh. But it may also make you deeply sad.
All of Fisher's novels have contained the obvious dental records of her life: There is her Hollywood pedigree, her absent father and wackadoo mother, her alcoholism and drug addictions, her intense relationship with ex-husband Paul Simon, her flimsy career as an actress, her baby with super-agent Bryan Lourd, who left her for a man, and, more recently, as she puts it, her "exclusive invitation to the mental institution," all dressed up in barely there fictional guises.
In "Wishful Drinking," Fisher dispenses with any pretense about mining her own veins for material. "I heard someone once say that we're only as sick as our secrets," she writes. "If that's true, then this book will go a long way to rendering me amazingly well."
The initial structural conceit of the book is that thanks to her recent bouts of electroconvulsive treatment (for the crippling depression and bipolarity) she is merely a bystander to her own life, in a state of continual surprise as portions of her own startling existence come back to her. According to the book, her answering machine message goes, "Hello and welcome to Carrie's voice mail. Due to recent Electro Convulsive Therapy, please pay close attention to the following options. Leave your name, number and a brief history as to how Carrie knows you, and she'll get back to you if this jogs what's left of her memory." Har.
