Wishful Drinking

My mother bought me this copy of Carrie Fisher's autobiography and I'm not sure I ever thanked her - I don't, as a rule, like autobiographies or biographies, though biographies are worse, because I don't like the sense of intrusion into someone's private life. Most autobiographies are ghost-written anyway, so there seems little point in reading them.

This one, however, was clearly not ghost-written and has buckets of personality in every line. As it was written by its subject, I didn't feel that I was sitting there going through someone's rubbish in order to get the dirt on them, which is how I usually feel (metaphorically, of course - I've never gone through someone's rubbish, so I have no real point of comparison).

Fisher is impressively honest, and tells you about her upbringing, her difficulties with drugs, her marriage to Paul Simon and her reaction to fame in detail. She has a very wry take on life, and one can't help but feel that her sense of humour may well be what's kept her alive. She seems to see the funny side of everything, even if she can't necessarily feel it, which one assumes she can't always.

My favourite chapter is the one where she rants about the Star Wars merchandise - of which, it seems, there is a truly incredible amount. From figurines, to Lego, to Pez dispensers, to (wait for it) a life-size sex doll. You know those things that come up in appalled articles in magazines every so ofter? Where they usually tell the story of some guy who's married one? Well, there's one of those in her likeness.

Can you imagine the weirdness of that? According to her, the best bit about that is that if someone tells her to go fuck herself - she can! (She says she tried it... Apparently it wasn't all that.) She happily tells you about her childhood. Not in so much detail that it gets boring (we don't find out her favourite breakfast cereal. Hey that's a good idea - have they made Star Wars cereal?), but in just enough to understand why she was the way she was.

It's also full of interesting little moments. Like, did you know when she got the part of Leia they asked her to lose 10 pounds? She weighed 105 at the time - that's 7 and a half stone... Also, she hated the hairstyle - you know, THE hairstyle. And they considered Christopher Walken for Han Solo. Imagine Star Wars without Harrison Ford...

It's a strange world alright, and Fisher does a fantastic job of expressing that in a personal and entertaining way. Definitely worth the read.