Carrie Fisher’s ‘Wishful Drinking’

 

Star Wars icon Carrie Fisher, 52, is busy touring the country with her wickedly funny memoir, Wishful Drinking, which she says is “anecdotal, not an autobiography.” “My memory isn’t good enough for that, not since the electroconvulsive therapy.”

Fisher, who at 19 was Princess Leia in the original Star Wars, recently filmed a remake of The House on Sorority Row, out in Octoberin Pittsburgh.  She says she dies in the horror flick, impaled by a tire iron, which “some people will be glad to hear.”

Wishful Drinking (Simon & Schuster, $21) grew out of her one-woman play that deals with drug addiction, mental illness and being the product of “Hollywood in-breeding.”

Fisher, who is single now, writes of her marriages to Paul Simon (“I was really good for (song) material, but when it came to day-to-day living, I was more than he could take”) and to agent Bryan Lourd, who left her for a man.  She says their daughter, Billie, 16, is a “powerful young lady. She has to be. She survived me.”

Other highlights include a Christmas where Fisher’s mom gifted her and her grandmother with sex toys, and a time she freaked out while smoking with Harrison Ford.

The book mentions her electroshock therapy, but mostly as a punch line. She says it’s not like the scenes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: “They put you to sleep, and the electricity is just in your head.”

She says it’s helped. The downside: “It wiped out four months of memory, but at my age, what’s going to happen in four months that won’t happen again?”