The title of Carrie
Fisher’s funny, sardonic little memoir is a bit misleading. Drinking seems
to have been the least of her problems. Pills were more her thing, and for a
while hallucinogens. As a teenager, she dropped so much acid that her parents
called in the greatest LSD expert they knew: Cary
Grant.
Her parents were Debbie
Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, and that was part of the problem. They were the
Jennifer and Brad of their day, the tabloids’ favorite couple, with Elizabeth
Taylor, for whom Mr. Fisher left his wife and family, eventually taking on
the role of Angelina, plusher and without the tattoos. “You might say I’m a
product of Hollywood inbreeding,” Ms. Fisher writes. “When two celebrities mate,
something like me is the result.”
Though Ms. Fisher now lives next door to her mother, and is on good terms
with her father, neither was much of a parent. He was too busy dating, getting
married and having face-lifts. She meant well enough, but was first and last a
performer. The great event of Ms. Fisher’s childhood was watching Mom enter one
end of a room-size closet — the Church of Latter Day Debbie, her daughter called
it — and come out the other powdered, sprayed and gowned, with better posture
and a different accent. As a consequence of her upbringing, Ms. Fisher says, “I
find that I don’t have what could be considered a conventional sense of
reality.”
When the author was 15, Ms. Reynolds gave her a vibrator for Christmas, and
also gave one to her own mother, who declined to use it for fear it would short
out her pacemaker. Some years later, perhaps taking the inbreeding principle to
extreme, Ms. Reynolds suggested that her daughter ought to have children with
Richard Hamlett, Ms. Reynold’s last husband.
People in Hollywood really are different, we have to conclude, and there’s no
reason to doubt Ms. Fisher when she says it’s no wonder she turned out as she
did, both hyper and insecure. To make things worse, she suffers from bipolar
disorder and all her life has shuttled between mood extremes. “I just have
basically too much personality for one person and not quite enough for two,” she
writes.
There was a brief, unhappy marriage to Paul
Simon, she reminds us, and an affair with, among many others, Senator Christopher
J. Dodd of Connecticut, who said of their relationship, “It was a long time
ago, in a galaxy far, far away” — a remark that Ms. Fisher thinks probably
doomed his bid for the presidency.
The father of her daughter, the agent Bryan Lourd, left her for another man,
prompting Ms. Reynolds to say: “You know, dear, we’ve had every sort of man in
our family — we’ve had horse thieves and alcoholics and one-man bands — but this
is our first homosexual!”
And of course there was George
Lucas, who cast her as Princess Leia in “Star Wars” and made her a pinup
girl for generations of geeky adolescents who gazed up in longing at their
bedroom poster of Ms. Fisher in a metallic bikini, chained to giant slug.
“George Lucas ruined my life,” Ms. Fisher says, which doesn’t seem entirely
fair. On the other hand, in a book full of weirdos, he emerges as possibly the
strangest of all. He wouldn’t let Ms. Fisher wear a bra under her Princess Leia
shift because, as he patiently explained to her, there is no underwear in space:
according to Lucas-physics, if you were to wear a bra in a weightless
environment, your bra would strangle you.
What her Hollywood upbringing doesn’t account for is Ms. Fisher’s manifest
intelligence and adroit way with words. She is one of the rare inhabitants of
La-La land who can actually write and has published four novels, the best of
which, the semi-autobiographical “Postcards From the Edge,” became a
prize-winning movie with a script by Ms. Fisher herself.
“Wishful Drinking,” however, grew out of a one-woman standup act, and it
shows. The book is pretty slight, padded out with big type, extra space between
the lines and some family photographs, and it displays at times an almost antic
need to entertain. The paragraphs are short, and the jokes — the puns, the
wisecracks, the deadpan one-liners — come rattling along at the rate of one
every other sentence or so.
It’s not entirely clear whose attention span is being catered to here: the
reader’s or Ms. Fisher’s. At the beginning of the book she explains that she has
undergone electroconvulsive shock therapy, which has erased some of her memory,
and one of the organizing conceits of “Wishful Drinking” is that she is trying
to get reacquainted with herself.
Here, she writes, is what the message on her answering machine says: “Hello
and welcome to Carrie’s voice mail. Due to recent electroconvulsive 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 her memory.” She’s kidding, but a more serious anxiety — a wish to assert
that she’s still here, still smart, still funny — may explain the book’s
glitter-eyed, Ancient Mariner quality, the way it buttonholes you and, desperate
to please, wrings laughs from the story of Ms. Fisher’s strange, off-the-wall
journey.
She won’t let you feel sorry for her, which is greatly to her credit in this
age of needy, tell-all celebrity memoirs, but neither can she relax or stop
joking. She writes: “If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is
unacceptable.” But her book is sometimes like a smile so forced it must
hurt.