When Carrie Fisher recently discovered the journals she kept during the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she was astonished to see what they had preserved – plaintive love poems, unbridled musings with youthful naiveté, and a vulnerability that she barely recognised.
Today her fame as an author, actress, and pop culture icon is indisputable, but in 1977 Carrie Fisher was just a teenager with an all-consuming crush on her costar. With these excerpts from her handwritten notebooks, The Princess Diarist is Fisher’s intimate and revealing recollection of what happened on one of the most famous film sets of all time – and what developed behind the scenes. And today, as she reprises her most iconic role for the latest Star Wars trilogy, Fisher also ponders the joys and insanity of celebrity and the absurdity of a life spawned by Hollywood royalty, only to be surpassed by her own outer-space royalty.
Laugh-out-loud hilarious and endlessly quotable, The Princess Diarist brims with the candour and introspection of a diary while offering shrewd insight into the type of stardom that few will ever experience.
©2016 Carrie Fisher (P)2016 Random House Audiobooks
Like most, I was gutted to learn of Carrie Fisher’s death on the 27th of December this year. Star Wars meant the world to me – I embarrassingly admit I had turned my beside locker into a Star Wars shrine as a kid…but I digress.
Up until this point I had heard a lot about Carrie Fisher’s writing but hadn’t read anything by her so when the hubby and I traveled down to Mayo to visit family only one audiobook came into my mind to listen to on the way down.
I instantly fell in love with Carrie’s wit and style, even more so as it’s narrated by her. It’s a bittersweet memoir as she looks back at her 19 year old self on the cusp of something that would become bigger than anything anyone could have imagined.
The big selling points of this book were what she refers to as “Carrisson” and her diaries, and while “Carrisson” was a chunk of the book, the diary entries weren’t as much as I’d like, particularly as they were narrated by Fisher’s daughter Billie Lourd.
She has such an insight into her 19 year old self that I (or at least the younger me) could identify with the neurotic people-pleasing need to make an impression and wishing you were someone else. OK maybe a 30 year old me can still identify with that as well. Her self-awareness is quite something and makes the loss of her wit and fun even more heartbreaking.
A wonderful book overall with a fantastic performance.
RIP Carrie Fisher
Thérèse talks books 