Monday, December 15, 2008

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.

3 comments:

  1. Hey Stephen - nice to see that Quote Unquote banner again. I was talking about that wonderful publication with some other writers recently - we all remembered it very fondly. I am pleased to see you have a blog now and will visit it again. Oh, and re. Carrie Fisher - I was reading somewhere recently about her ridiculous Leia hairstyle - I think the director decided on it, for some reason that now escapes me...

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  2. Yes, I heard about that meeting with the other writers - you know how people talk - and that you had expressed a desire for Quote Unquote to be revived somehow. Your wish is my command.

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  3. As soon as it was clear 'Star Wars' was going to be a mega hit Carrie Fisher renounced sex, She was anxious that men would go around town saying they had 'f...ked Princess Leia' It is not known whether this self imposed celibacy had a bad effect on her, being Californian and all, and possibly triggered an episode of unwellness. It is also unknown whether R2D2 felt compelled to the same stance

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