Princess Leia and the Force of Wit: Carrie Fisher’s ‘Wishful Drinking’

The title of Carrie Fisher’s funny, sardonic little memoir is a bit misleading. Drinking seems to have been the least of her problems. Pills were more her thing, and for a while hallucinogens. As a teenager, she dropped so much acid that her parents called in the greatest LSD expert they knew: Cary Grant.

Her parents were Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, and that was part of the problem. They were the Jennifer and Brad of their day, the tabloids’ favorite couple, with Elizabeth Taylor, for whom Mr. Fisher left his wife and family, eventually taking on the role of Angelina, plusher and without the tattoos. “You might say I’m a product of Hollywood inbreeding,” Ms. Fisher writes. “When two celebrities mate, something like me is the result.”

Though Ms. Fisher now lives next door to her mother, and is on good terms with her father, neither was much of a parent. He was too busy dating, getting married and having face-lifts. She meant well enough, but was first and last a performer. The great event of Ms. Fisher’s childhood was watching Mom enter one end of a room-size closet — the Church of Latter Day Debbie, her daughter called it — and come out the other powdered, sprayed and gowned, with better posture and a different accent. As a consequence of her upbringing, Ms. Fisher says, “I find that I don’t have what could be considered a conventional sense of reality.”

When the author was 15, Ms. Reynolds gave her a vibrator for Christmas, and also gave one to her own mother, who declined to use it for fear it would short out her pacemaker. Some years later, perhaps taking the inbreeding principle to extreme, Ms. Reynolds suggested that her daughter ought to have children with Richard Hamlett, Ms. Reynold’s last husband.

People in Hollywood really are different, we have to conclude, and there’s no reason to doubt Ms. Fisher when she says it’s no wonder she turned out as she did, both hyper and insecure. To make things worse, she suffers from bipolar disorder and all her life has shuttled between mood extremes. “I just have basically too much personality for one person and not quite enough for two,” she writes.

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There was a brief, unhappy marriage to Paul Simon, she reminds us, and an affair with, among many others, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, who said of their relationship, “It was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” — a remark that Ms. Fisher thinks probably doomed his bid for the presidency.