Carrie Fisher - Wishful Drinking

CARRIE FISHER - Wishful Drinking

Happy days are here again

So lets sing a song of cheer again

Hi, Im Carrie Fisher and Im an alcoholic.

And this is a true story.

INTRODUCTION:

AN ABUNDANCE OF APPARENTLYS

So I am fifty-two years old. (Apparently.) Actually, thats more verifiable than the rest of it. Id better start off with certainties. Here are the headlines (headin so many waysbeing the operative word):

I am fifty-two years old.

I am Carrie Fisher.

I live in a really nice house in Los Angeles.

I have two dogs.

I have a daughter named Billie.

Carrie Fisher is apparently a celebrity of sorts. I mean, she was (is) the daughter of famous parents. One an icon, the other a consort to icons. Actually, thats not completely fair. My father is a singer named Eddie Fisher. What was, in the 50s, called a crooner. A crooner with many gold records. I only say my father is a consort because hes really better known for his (not so) private life than the life he lived onstage. His scandals outshone his celebrity. Or you might say that his scandals informed his celebrity in such a way as to make him infamous.

My mother, Debbie Reynolds, was in what might be called iconic filmsmost notably, Singin in the Rain. But for whatever reason, when my parents hooked up it had an extraordinary impact on the masses who bought fan magazines. The media dubbed them Americas Sweethearts. The idea of them electrifiedtheir pic tures graced the covers of all the tabloids of the day. They were adorable and as such were ogled by an army of eyes. So cute and cuddly and in some ways adorably average. The Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston of the late 50s, only slightly more sobecause they actually managed to procreatemaking two tiny children to fill out the picture. Or pictures, as the case turned out to be. An All-American and photogenic family.

When I was younger, starting at about four, other children would ask me what it was like to be a movie stars daughter. Once I was a little older and understood, to a certain extent, the nature of what celebrity meant, I would say, Compared to what? When I wasnt a movie stars daughter? When I lived with my normal, non-show business family, the Regulars (Patty and Lowell Regular of Scottsdale, Arizona)? All Ive ever known is this sort of hot-house-plant existence, and I could tell from watching how normal people livednormal people as depicted by Hollywood and burned into our consciousnessI understood that my life was unusual. Like many others, I grew up watching television shows like My Three Sons and The Partridge Family and The Real McCoys. And based on the lives depicted on those shows, I knew my life was a different sort of real. It was the only reality I knew, but compared to other folksboth on television and offit eventually struck me as a little surreal, too. And eventually, too, I understood that my version of reality had a tendency to set me apart from others. And when youre young you want to fit in. (Hell, I still want to fit in with certain humans, but as you get older you get a little more discriminating.) Well, my parents were professionally committed to sticking out, so all too frequently I found myself sticking out right along with them.

Now, Im certainly not asking anyone to feel bad for me or suggest that my existence could be described as a predicament of some kind. Im simply describing the dynamic that was at work during my formative years.

My parents were focus pullersand when I say parents, I mean my mother, who raised me, and my father, who checked in from time to time.

I mean, if I came into a room and said, You know how you saw your father more on TV than you did in real life? I dont think many people would say, Oh my God! You, too!

And by the same token, I have to ask you, how often do you say, in real life?

Like real life is this other thing, and were always trying to determine whats going on in this distant, inaccessible, incomprehensible place.

What are they like in real life?

That happened in real life? Really!

Stuff like that.

I am truly a product of Hollywood. You might say that Im a product of Hollywood inbreeding. When two celebrities mate, something like me is the result.

I grew up visiting sets, playing on backlots, and watching movies being made. As a consequence, I find that I dont have what could be considered a conventional sense of reality. (Not that Ive ever had much use for realityhaving spent much of what I laughingly refer to as my adult life attempting to escape it with the assistance of a variety of drugs.)

So, as I said, my reality has been formed by Hollywoods version of reality. As a child, I thought that Father Knows Best was real and that my life was fake. When I think about it now, I may not have been far wrong.

I tell you all of this as a newly made bystander. As I have been reintroduced into my world by electroconvulsive therapy (more commonly known as ECT for those oh-so-fortunately familiar with it and electroshock for those who are not)reintroduced to my life at the ripe old age of fifty-two. My memoryespecially my visual memoryhas been wrenched from me. All of a sudden, I find that I seem to have forgotten who I was before. So, I need to reacquaint myself with this sort of celebrity person I seem to be. Someone who was in an iconic, blockbuster film called Star Wars. (How trippy is that?)

One thing I do recall is that one day when I was a toddler, I sat planted closely to the television set watching my mother in a movie called Susan Slept Here. And, at a certain point theres a scene where my very young mother tilts her face up to receive a kiss from Dick Powell. A kiss on the mouth. A romantic kiss. So, she has her eyes closed, waiting. But instead of kissing her on the mouth, Mr. Powell bends down and kisses her on the forehead. I sit there, registering this and then look quickly over my shoulder to see if anyone else had seen what I saw. To see if I should be more embarrassed for my mother than I already was. I tell you this to illustrate that I didnt know the difference between movies and real life. In my life, they tended to overlap. Cary Grant (yes, the Cary Grant) became a family friend, even though he wasnt precisely that. And characters that my mother played in movies became confused with the person who was and is my mother. So in a way, movies became home movies. Home became another place on the movie star map.

Later on, I worked out that my mothers appearance in the classic film Singin in the Rain was not unlike my own appearance in Star Wars. When she made that film, she was nineteen and costarred with two men. I was also nineteen when I made Star Wars and appeared opposite two men. How this is relevant, I have no idea. Maybe I was just grasping around for a sense of continuity.

I emerge from my three-week-long ECT treatment to discover that I am not only this Princess Leia creature but also several-sized dolls, various T-shirts and posters, some cleansing items, and a bunch of other merchandise. It turns out I was even a kind of pin-upa fantasy that geeky teenage boys across the globe jerked off to me with some frequency. Hows that for a newborn-how-do-you-do damsel in very little cinematic distress?

To wit, one afternoon in Berkeley I found myself walking into a shop that sold rocks and gems.

Oh my God, arent you

the salesman behind the counter exclaimed.

And before he could go any further, I modestly said, Yes, I am.

Oh my God! I thought about you every day from when I was twelve to when I was twenty-two.

And instead of asking what happened at twenty-two, I said, Every day?

He shrugged and said, Well, four times a day.

Welcome to the land of too much information.

On top of all this celebrity parents and Star Wars stuff, apparently I was once married to a brilliant songwriter, a rock icon of sorts. I mean, this is a man who wrote an array of beautiful songs, and even a few songs that were about me. How incredible is that? And get thisI had always been a really big fan of his music. Huge. As a teen, it was just him and Joni Mitchell. And, as I couldnt marry Joni, I married him. I loved this mans lyrics. They were one of the reasons I fell in love with words.