Book Review: Wishful Drinking

Update, 09/20/2009: I was so enthralled with someone being the subject of a Paul Simon song that I didn't really tell you a lot about this book and why you might want to read it, too.

Carrie Fisher - actress, author, mother, survivor, and subject of a song written by ex-husband, Paul Simon - may be best known to people my age as the daughter of celebrities, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, and to younger people as Princess Leia in the Star Wars trilogy.

Here she reviews her incredible life of being a child in Hollywood; her father leaving their family to marry Elizabeth Taylor; her addictions; her acting; her writing; her bipolar diagnosis; marrying a closeted gay man; the death of her best friend...in her bed...while she was in it; and, raising what sounds like an incredible daughter.  All of these things are written about with incredible humor, which is probably why Carrie Fisher is what is called a 'survivor'.  Oh, and she is a Libra.

Now, knowing this about Carrie Fisher, one understands how Paul Simon could write such beautiful lyrics about her.  Will you be a lesser person for not reading this book? No. But, for a Friday night, it is a good read and not in that weird, National Inquirer-kind of gossip.



Random Reading Challenge

Wishful Drinking
~ Carrie Fisher

There are a few writers whose writing causes me to laugh out loud - early Woody Allen, David Sedaris, and Carrie Fisher.  Since I had pretty much read everything she had written and her interviews, there wasn't a lot to learn about her that I didn't already know.  Yet, I enjoyed reviewing her life with her again.

I didn't know much about her relationship with Paul Simon.  To have Paul Simon write a song about you.... let me just say, wow.  Lyrics like:

And I'm afraid that I'll be taken / Abandoned and forsaken / In her cold coffee eyes...

She's come back to tell me she's gone / As if I didn't know that / As if I didn't know my own bed / As if I didn't notice the way she brushed her hair from her forehead

...my heart is allergic / To the woman I love / And it's changing the shape of my face....

One and one-half wandering Jews / Returned to their natural coasts / To resume old acquaintances / Step out occasionally / And speculate who had been damaged the most....

Sigh.....

While it wasn't so fun and easy for the author, her humor makes it a fun, easy read.  I look forward to reading what her daughter, Billie, has to say about it all!

Great line:  Anyway, how would I know what was post-traumatic stress, which is addiction, which is bipolar, and which is Libra?