Review: Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge

Until author Sheila Weller wrote 2008's Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--and the Journey of a Generation, her subjects had tended toward the lurid (e.g., Raging Heart: The Intimate Story of the Tragic Marriage of O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson). That such a writer has tackled the life story of Carrie Fisher would likely have amused the actress, who was also an author, a script doctor and, perhaps above all, an irreverent wit.

From her stage show and subsequent book Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher was known for her comic observations about the trials of being the offspring of flamboyant actress Debbie Reynolds and caddish crooner Eddie Fisher; about sealing her fate (for better or worse) and fortunes (for better) as brainy badass Princess Leia in 1977's Star Wars; and about coping with drug addiction and bipolar disorder. (Weller notes that Fisher was one of the first celebrities to discuss publicly having a mental illness.) Given Fisher's openness about her life, any Carrie Fisher biographer would have a galactic challenge: What can she tell readers that Fisher hasn't already?

Lots, if that biographer is Weller. She cast a net far and wide to land interviews with subjects famous and not, speaking on the record and off, but Fisher defenders nearly all. In Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge, Weller blends their recollections with what she calls Fisher's "provocative, braggingly self-deprecating (a neat trick), honest enough" accounts, as of her early failed marriage to singer-songwriter Paul Simon and her late-career weight gain. The result is a robust, many-faceted portrait of a woman whose longstanding feminism (Fisher marched for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980s) elevated everything she touched. Here's Fisher the script doctor's rule of thumb: "Make the women smarter--and the love scenes better." Weller reminds readers that Carrie-as-Leia's likeness was ubiquitous at the Women's March in January 2017, one month after the actress's sudden death at age 60; the cause was cardiac arrest with a likely assist from the drugs named in her toxicology report--a heartbreaking exit given her decades devoted to exorcising her personal demons.

The question while reading Carrie Fisher isn't "How did her life veer off course?" but "How did she keep it together for so long?" The answer would seem to lie in Fisher's mutual emotional support system. Going by the company described in Weller's book, it would probably be quicker to list the people who weren't Fisher's friends than the people who were. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Shelf Talker: This satisfying biography of Carrie Fisher, the late actress, writer, wit and mental-health advocate, brings to the fore two additional defining attributes: feminist and friend.

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