Wishful Drinking

Carrie Fisher wrote Wishful Drinking as if she had looked at the full catastrophe of fame, family, addiction, mental health, Hollywood, Princess Leia, bad decisions, worse headlines and the entire machinery of public fascination, then decided the only sensible response was to turn it into a nightclub act with better punctuation.

This is not a misery memoir, although there is misery in it. It is not a celebrity memoir, although celebrities wander through it like furniture in a very expensive haunted house. It is not a recovery manual, although Fisher has plainly recovered from enough things to qualify as a small civil service department. It is Carrie Fisher doing what she did best: taking the raw material of a life that should probably have come with protective goggles and making it fast, filthy, funny, wounded and completely awake.

Born to Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, accidentally drafted into American mythology by Star Wars, immortalised in a metal bikini she did not ask to become a cultural talking point, and then forced to live as both a person and a collectible figurine, Fisher had more than enough material. Most people get one complicated identity. She got several, plus merchandise. She writes about all of it with the timing of someone who knows the joke is funniest when it still has teeth.

The title is perfect, because Wishful Drinking is full of the comic optimism of people who know optimism is unreliable but keep ordering it anyway. Fisher’s humour is not decorative. It is load-bearing. She uses it the way some people use scaffolding, confession, revenge, medication, or a very large handbag: to hold together the parts of life that polite conversation would prefer to leave in another room. Addiction, electroconvulsive therapy, bipolar disorder, broken marriages, family chaos, public shame — all of it is dragged onstage, handed a drink, and made to perform.

What makes the book work is that Fisher never mistakes glamour for safety. Hollywood, in her telling, is not a dream factory so much as a brightly lit accident site with excellent catering. Fame does not protect you from disaster; it merely ensures that disaster is photographed from several angles. Being Princess Leia did not save her from being Carrie Fisher, and being Carrie Fisher seems to have involved a heroic amount of wit deployed against a heroic amount of nonsense.

It is sharp, brisk, rude, clever and oddly generous. Fisher can be savage, but she is rarely dull. Even when she is skewering herself, there is a sense of survival rather than self-pity. She knows the absurdity of becoming an icon before fully becoming an adult. She knows the indignity of explaining your private collapse to strangers. She knows that sometimes the punchline is not an escape from pain but the only honest way through it.

This Simon and Schuster copy is in Good condition, which feels right for a book about surviving the public, the private, and the intergalactic with one’s sarcasm intact. Crappy Old Books offers it for anyone who likes memoirs with bite, celebrity without varnish, and jokes that have clearly been through airport security with emotional baggage.

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