Carrie Fisher’s life is a perfect storm of funny. Not many folks are privileged enough to have Bob Dylan show up at one of their cocktail parties wearing a parka and sunglasses. Even fewer are capable of coming up with the perfect zinger for the occasion: “Thank God you wore that, Bob, because sometimes late at night here the sun gets really, really bright, then it snows.” Fisher’s big, beautiful brain is the perfect filter for a life too trippy and surreal for fiction.
I like to think that in every soul-shattering trauma lies an amusing anecdote. Fisher’s life beautifully illustrates my theory: she’s capable of wringing the breeziest of laughs from the most horrifying of experiences. Her delightful new memoir Wishful Drinking delves deep into the seldom-explored lighter side of alcoholism, parental abandonment, drug addiction, manic-depression, and what used to be called “electro-shock therapy” but now is known by the more sensitive term, “frying yer brain up but good to chase away them demons and spooks and brain-bogeymen and whatnot”. Oh, and waking up one morning next to a dead gay Republican. And marrying a gay man. Yes, Fisher has learned to laugh long and hard at unspeakable traumas: madness, death, divorce and most harrowing of all, the dialogue of George Lucas.
Fisher has lived to tell the tale, and what a tale it is. Fisher was born in the white-hot epicenter of fame, the progeny of Singing In The Rain superstar Debbie Reynolds and Jewish crooner Eddie Fisher, who the lady-author lovingly depicts as a neglectful, perpetually pot-addled gold-digger and shameless media whore. Seriously. Fisher accomplishes the formidable feat of crafting thumbnail satirical sketches of George Lucas, ex-husband Paul Simon and her dear old dad that are unsparing yet strangely affectionate. Fisher’s chapter on Star Wars for example, begins,
“Forty-three years ago George Lucas ruined my life. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. And now, seventy-two years later, people are still asking me if I knew Star Wars was going to bee that big of a hit.
Yes, of course I knew. We all knew. The only one who didn’t know was George Lucas. We kept it from him, because we wanted to see what his face looked like when it changed expression—and he fooled us even then. He got Industrial Light and Magic to change his facial expression for him and THX sound to make the noise of a face-changing expression.