Edna O’Brien once said if she could change anything about her life, it would be to make it “funnier”. Through her life, it seems as though Carrie Fisher learned of O’Brien’s regrets, and was committed to a funnier life. She wrote: “if my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.” At the embarrassments and the tragedies, Fisher’s life was constantly stranger than fiction, moulding a woman so phenomenally talented and creative that it is impossible to over-appreciate her work.
Fisher’s biography, in many ways, starts before her birth. She took her place in Hollywood history the moment she was born, being the daughter of the famous couple Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, the former of whom she had a strong, though tiring, relationship with throughout her life. Fisher lived a life full of this rarified celebrity, going through decades which were so defined and severed from the others that it’s like she was an actress, playing a different part for a decade at a time. As she summarized herself, there were the Star Wars years, the years in and out of rehab and the years as a relatively more relaxed writer.
Fisher broke away from her parents’ light astronomically with the role as Princess Leia in Star Wars, introducing her to a crowd totally unaware of her legendary lineage. Leia became the role she is indubitably linked to, she said of the character: “she is me and I am her”. Nothing has outshone her work as the General, and throughout her career, she asserted that she did not desire to escape the character of Leia. That said, through her creative life, writing dominated her time.
Her success from Star Wars, though culturally significant, was not personally successful for long. Fisher infamously sold the rights away to use her image in merchandising, making her shut out from any profits made by the Star Wars franchise. She had literally sold the replication of her face and body, meaning posters, Pez dispensers and figurines could be made without her permission and with Fisher left without a penny of profit. She called the act “vampiric”. Fisher began looking for other ways to earn money outside of the series which made her and which she helped make.
She decided “to make a living at writing,” and so she did. Looking at her creative corpus, she wrote more than she acted. It totals an impressive eight books, four novels and four memoirs, all of which became bestsellers, the latter publications becoming their respective genuine cultural and literary events. Alongside books, she became a script doctor, diagnosing and fixing film scripts, making them funnier and more accessible, similar to the job Phoebe Waller-Bridge was hired to do on the most recent James Bond film, No Time to Die. However, she garnered little credit for these in the tradition of most script doctors. She recrafted the scripts of Sister Act, The Wedding Singer and Hook, saying of her profession as a script doctor: “I was brought on to do a particular thing, to make the love scenes better and the women smarter.”
By the time she began fixing scripts she was already a vetted bestselling author, writing about her own life, to varying degrees of historical accuracy. She wrote Wishful Drinking, a memoir made from the original stage show accounting her experience of addiction and mental illness and Surrender the Pink, a semi-autobiographical novel based loosely on Fisher’s short marriage to Paul Simon. Her memoirs and novels recount most periods of her life, especially so the dramatic experiences with addiction and fame she faced. In line with her commitment to turning her personal horrors into public humour, they all paint a funny view of things, distorting an expectantly terrifying image into something so ludicrous and zainy that your first instinct is always to laugh. Fisher started with the publication of Postcards from the Edge in 1987, a fictionalisation of Fisher’s life during and after her time in a drug rehabilitation centre. The book is written in two parts, beginning in first person with diary entries from the protagonist Suzanne Vale and then begins to tell Suzanne’s story from a second person perspective, detailing her release from rehab and the complicated relationship she has with her famous mother, inspired by Fisher’s own manic relationship with Debbie Reynolds. It was turned into a feature film starring Meryl Streep, for which Fisher wrote the script. The writing cracks with whip-smart humour and Fisher seems immune to sentimentality. The book opens with the lines: “Maybe I shouldn’t have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares? My life is over anyway”.
The Princess Diarist, her final book to be published, shares diary entries written by 19 year old Fisher during the filming of Star Wars, which became a backdrop for her scandalous affair with her co-star Harrison Ford. In both her novels and memoirs, Fisher takes tragedies and doctors them into comedies, healing hurts with laughter and taking on the brunt of the joke herself. She fuses life and art so brilliantly that they seem to be inextricably linked, and for her, they needed to be. Her work may not tell her own story exactly, but it speaks for her in so many ways, just as she wrote: “I don’t want my life to imitate art, I want my life to be art”
