Leia upon Leia

Carrie Fisher became famous as Princess Leia in Star Wars, which she says ruined her life. She then successfully reinvented herself as a comic novelist (Postcards from the Edge, etc) and scriptwriter, using her own experiences with drug addiction and manic depression, not to mention being the child of a couple of cracked actors, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. She has now written her autobiography, Wishful Drinking. Lyn Barber reviews it in the Daily Telegraph:

Debbie is a game old bird – still performing at 78. Eddie Fisher said in his autobiography that she was a lesbian but, Fisher exclaims indignantly, “My mother is not a lesbian! She’s just a really really bad heterosexual.” She once gave Carrie, then aged 15, and her grandmother matching vibrators for Christmas, but the grandmother said she didn’t want to use it because it might short-circuit her pacemaker and anyway she’d lived all this time without having an orgasm, she didn’t plan to start now. . .

[Fisher] has a wonderful self-deprecating wit and total lack of self-pity – there is none of the I Will Survive grandiosity one expects from Hollywood memoirs. The only sad note is that Fisher says she recently had electro-convulsive therapy for depression, which cured her condition but left her with no memory at all. She has a message on her answering machine telling callers to leave their name, number and a brief account of who they are and how they know her. She is a one-off and a joy.