A bizarre memoir, which doesn’t do what it said on the tin…

In Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher tells the true and intoxicating story of her life with inimitable wit. Born to celebrity parents, she was picked to play a princess in a little movie called Star Wars when only 19 years old. “But it isn’t all sweetness and light sabers.”

Alas, aside from a demanding career and her role as a single mother (not to mention the hyperspace hairdo), Carrie also spends her free time battling addiction, weathering the wild ride of manic depression and lounging around various mental institutions. It’s an incredible tale – from having Elizabeth Taylor as a stepmother, to marrying (and divorcing) Paul Simon, from having the father of her daughter leave her for a man, to ultimately waking up one morning and finding a friend dead beside her in bed.

This is memoir is… rather mad for the most part (certainly the beginning). Not always in a good way, sadly. Wishful Drinking was not what I’d expected, nor as I’d hoped. In some ways, this should have been expected — for the first 20% of the audiobook, Fisher tells us about the ECT she had, which basically destroyed most of her memories. (Which, when you think about it, makes it rather strange, the urge to write a memoir, then…) Fisher basically offers a three-hour, acerbic take on her family and substance abuse. It sometimes veers into glib (rather than risque), and the humour falls flat too often. I really don’t know what to think about this audiobook/memoir. Continue reading →