AT AN AMERICANFilm Institute
‘roast’ of Harrison Ford in 2000, Carrie Fisher
stood up and faced the star-studded crowd. “Hi,
my name is Carrie and I’m an alcoholic,” she said.
“Oh, sorry, wrong group... Well, actually, maybe
not.” However charismatic and proicient Fisher
was an actor, she was born to be a writer.
Her credited output runs to four novels
(Postcards From The Edge,Surrender The Pink,
Delusions Of Grandma,The Best Awful There Is),
three memoirs (Wishful Drinking,Shockaholic,The
Princess Diarist) and two screenplays (Postcards,
These Old Broads). Yet she irst put pen to paper
seriously aged 12. “That was therapeutic for me in
those days,” she said. “I wrote things to get out of
feeling them, and onto paper. So writing in a way
saved me.” It rescued her from one of the most
tumultuous Tinseltown upbringings imaginable.FISHER OFTEN JOKED
thatStar Warssounded like a ight between her
mother and father. She was the irst child ofSingin’
In The Rainstar Debbie Reynolds and pop star
Eddie Fisher, a couple so golden they made
Brangelina look like Alf and Ailsa Stewart. When
Carrie was two, Eddie Fisher left Reynolds to be
with Elizabeth Taylor. Seeing her father “more on
TV than on the planet” and with her mother away
maintaining a career, Fisher’s childhood became
deined by absence. And when Reynolds was
present, Carrie had to share her mother with the
world. “People sort of walked over me to get to
her,” Fisher toldThe New York Times.
Her relationship with her mother was complex,
a mixt of love and rivalry (Fisher joined Reynolds’stage act as a 13-year-old), pointedly satirised in
Postcards From The Edge. The pair hardly spoke
during Fisher’s thirties yet achieved peace later in
life, living next door to each other until their deaths
in December, just one day apart.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, in such an isolated
childhood, the young Fisher found solace in books.
“I was a freaky kid,” she toldRolling Stonein- “I loved language and I would read all these
books. I liked Truman Capote and I was obsessed
with Dorothy Parker. I wanted to be her. I was just
in love with words and they saved me from a lot of
stuff. Books were my irst drug. They took me away
from everything and I would just consume them.”
Fisher’s writing details a Hollywood life as full
as any ever put on paper. FromWishful Drinking
alone, she remembers Elizabeth Taylor as a
stepmom, the fallout of being in the biggest ilm
franchise of all time, a year-long marriage to Paul
Simon, having partner Bryan Lourd leave her for
another man, waking up next to the dead body of
her friend Greg Stevens, then believing for years his
ghost haunted her mansion. And there was enough
left for two more autobiographies.
Yet in between the biographical landmarks
were lifelong struggles. Fisher discovered actual
(rather than literary) drugs about the same time she
started writing. Pot at 13. LSD at 21. Cocaine on
the set ofEmpire. Snorting heroin rather than
injecting. Her writing always displayed a clear-eyed
view of her own addictions. “I was very offended
someone would think I was suicidal,” she once said.
“They said, ‘Well, your behaviour is suicidal.’ And
I said, ‘Well, my behaviour might be, but I’m not.’
I literally thought that way.”
IF CARRIE FISHER FOUND FAME AS A PRINCESS, SHE
DISCOVERED HER TRUE CALLING AS A WRITER
WORDS IAN FREERcarrie fisher: the empire tribute