An Ode to Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher is easily my favorite author. She has completely changed the way I view writing and even life. With the anniversary of death recently passing, all I could think about was how lucky this world was to have someone like Carrie Fisher. Her wit, wordplay, strength, and honesty made her a unique type of writer and person. There will simply never be another Carrie Fisher. 

One of Fisher’s most famous quotes “I am truly a product of Hollywood in-breeding. When two celebrities mate, someone like me is the result” is the perfect way to describe her upbringing. For those of you who don’t know, she was born in 1956 and was the daughter of the beloved and famous actress, Debbie Reynolds, and crooner, Eddie Fisher. They were America’s sweethearts in the early 1950s until Fisher had an affair with the recently widowed and close family friend, Elizabeth Taylor, and then promptly left his family for Taylor. But that’s a story for another day. 

Nonetheless, she is most known for her portrayal of Princess Leia in Star Wars. Which was groundbreaking in its own right. At only 19, and in her first massive role, she was able to recreate the standard for what a strong female lead is and should be. Princess Leia didn’t need saving and wasn’t just a side character that was only there to be a love interest to the main male characters. She saved herself and did it better than any of the other male leads could have. Which is what made Princess Leia the iconic character that she is today. 

Although, underneath the success of Star Wars and her already seemly glamorous life as the child of Hollywood royalty, she was going through more than the general public would assume at the time. She was struggling with addiction and would later be diagnosed as bipolar at the age of 29. 

Nevertheless, her mental health struggles would later inspire her best work. Even though Fisher was known publicly as an actress, her real calling always seemed to be writing. Most would say she was a writer who acted rather than an actor who writes. After an accidental overdose in 1985, she started writing her first book,

Postcards from the Edge, a fictional retelling of her experiences in rehab, living with addiction, rebuilding an acting career, and being a child of famous Hollywood parents. 

Postcards from the Edge became a best seller. It later was adapted into an award-winning movie starring Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep. Postcards from the Edge, and most of Fisher’s work, was mainly loved for it’s witty but vulnerable way of discussing Fisher’s personal struggles. 

Most of us can’t relate to rebuilding an acting career after a stint in rehab or having famous parents, but we can relate to her depression, anxiety, fears, doubts, insecurities, etc. Maybe the situations Fisher or her characters found themselves in weren’t the most relatable, but the heart of her writing is easily translatable. 

When she started to be public about her bipolar disorder diagnosis and addiction in the 1980s, there was a huge stigma around it. There still is. At the time, the safer and probably heavily recommended choice for such a huge Hollywood star would have been to keep quiet. She had a lot to lose but that didn’t stop her from being outspoken. “If you claim something, you can own it. But if you have it as a shameful secret, you’re fucked”, she told Vanity Fair in 2009, 

She made things that we were told to hide funny. She wasn’t the butt of the joke, the skeletons in her closet were. I think that was her real gift. 

Fisher would later go on to write Surrender the Pink, Delusions of Grandma, The Best Awful There Is, Wishful Drinking, Shockaholic, and fan-favorite The Princess Diarist. Which are all successful and unbelievably amusing in their own right. 

She would also become one of Hollywood’s most popular script doctors for movies like Hook (1991), Sister Act (1992), Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), and The River Wild (1994). She was easily Hollywood’s best-kept secret when it comes to script doctoring. To add to her already impressive resume, she created her own one-woman Broadway show, Wishful Drinking, which was prosperous enough to tour around multiple cities and have an HBO documentary made about the show.

Then in 2015, she would later reprise her iconic role as Princess Leia in the newest Star Wars trilogy. 

On December 27, 2016, Carrie Fisher died during a transatlantic flight from London to Los Angeles. But the intrusive details of her death don’t matter. Or at least not as much as Daily Mail or TMZ pretended they did. What does matter is the legacy she left behind and all the lives she was able to affect. As always, she said it best; “I want it to be reported that I drowned in moonlight strangled by my own bra.”