The actress maintains a sense of humor about her often tumultuous life.
[M]y entire existence could be summed up in one phrase. And that is: If my life wasn't funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.
Carrie Fisher
As Carrie Fisher explains it early in this brisk, entertaining adaptation of her 2006 one-woman stage show, she had famous parents. Debbie Reynolds was the beloved star of Singin' in the Rain who possessed a vast storehouse of clothing in her Beverly Hills closet and could always be relied upon to transform herself into a movie star before her astonished children's eyes. Eddie Fisher was a crooner who bedded Elizabeth Taylor, among many others, and later wrote a memoir about his conquests, and was almost entirely absent from Carrie's childhood.
Of course, the irony is that although Reynolds and Fisher were the “Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston" of their day, as Fisher puts it, thanks to a taciturn, weirdo visionary named George Lucas, Carrie Fisher has achieved an iconic fame that blows her parents' out of the water. Sure, plenty of people still remember Debbie and Eddie and the Golden Age of faux-domestic Hollywood glamour they symbolized. They were big stars, matinee idols and celebrity magazine mainstays. But they weren't Princess Leia.
Readers are now familiar with Fisher's authorial personality, as it has been worked out in hilarious personal sendups such as Postcards From the Edge (made into a 1990 film directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine), Surrender the Pink, Delusions of Grandma and The Best Awful. This run proves, if nothing else, Fisher has a knack for titles. But she also has a talent for lacerating insight that masquerades as carefree self-deprecation.
Jagged sensibility
In this sense, Princess Leia, far from being the albatross around her neck, is the key to her soul. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone better to inhabit this irritable, petulant example of intergalactic royalty. In the Star Wars movies, Fisher's jagged sensibility is on display, whether jousting with Harrison Ford's space cowboy, expressing dismay at Mark Hamill's cosmic Boy Scout or staring down a malevolent Lord Vader. It makes perfect sense that the cover of “Wishful Drinking" depicts a head-bowed Leia, emptied martini glass in hand, with a handful of pills scattered nearby.
