“A love so big”: The Memoirs of Carrie Fisher

After idolising her for quite literally my entire existence upon this Earth, I had the ridiculous privilege of meeting Carrie Fisher a fortnight before she died. I spent three hours beside her signing table for The Princess Diarist in London, managing the queue, listening to adoring fans stumbling over themselves in the frenetic rush to articulate just how much she meant to them in several wildly insufficient seconds, watching her respond to each with such aggressive warmth and wit and bone-dry asides to Gary in the seat next to her, trying not to utterly lose the very tentative hold I had on the skimpiest facade of composure. At the end, she signed my copy and told me she liked my name. And so I completed my collection of her memoirs.

It wasn’t until the winter of 2020, four years later, that I could finally bring myself to read them.

Wishful Drinking thrums with so much heart and hope, so much ferocious love for life. It’s the one that was published first, and thus the one to start with, a raucous book-length version of her equally raucous stage tour. It’s also a primer on her brutal battles with mental illness and drug abuse, ones she also touches on in The Princess Diarist.

“I find that I frequently feel better about myself when I discover that we’re not alone, you know? That there are, in fact, a number of other people who ail as we do, that there are actually a number of accomplished individuals who find it necessary to seek treatment for some otherwise insurmountable inner unpleasantness. I not only feel better about myself because these people are also fucked up, and I guess that gives us a kind of sense of extended community, but I feel better because look how much these fellow fuck-ups managed to accomplish.”

“One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness. In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls. Not unlike a tour of duty in Afghanistan (though the bombs and bullets, in this case, come from the inside). At times, being mentally ill can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you’re living with this illness and functioning at all, it’s something to be proud of, not ashamed of. They should issue medals along with the steady stream of medications one has to ingest.”

The Princess Diarist is perhaps the most soul-shredding, revealing the traumatic relationship that defined her coming-of-age chapter, along with the aching poetry she wrote as it was all falling to pieces.

“I’m on physical and mental reserves. Carefully selecting and gathering all the ingredients for my recipe for ruin. Homemade hysteria. Fresh from my mind and ready to serve. Torment to go.”

“I’m too preoccupied with my precious panic. It seems to be demanding almost all of my attention.”

But Shockaholic is the one that stormed out into the tempest, gathered up every broken bleeding shard of me into its arms, and stolidly marched right back to the blazing brink of the hearth. It’s about addiction, the love she avidly searched for to shore up the void, her experience of electroconvulsive therapy, the friends who died around her, the pilot ship her daughter presented in the darkest nights even if she couldn’t always follow her, and, perhaps above all, her fraught relationship with her father. The force of the catharsis simmers and vibrates off the page like sun-baked tarmac.

I can hardly stand to think of all the books she still had to write, the ones she would’ve written in the decades snatched from her by the book tour that cost her her life, perhaps one about her mother, even with her mother, or ones illuminating chapters previously glossed over in her most extraordinary of stories, and certainly more fiction, both in novels and screenplays.

In their absence, I’ll remain eternally grateful for the ones we do have, and they couldn’t have found me in a more prescient, more pertinent, more poignant, more perfect week. In fact, it wouldn’t be hyperbole to say my 2020 was saved by her words.

Here are just a few of the countless I’ll carry with me forever:

“Offstage, I couldn’t put things into words, and that was the one thing I’d always been able to rely on. Putting my feelings into words and praying they wouldn’t be able to get out again. It had always been my salvation. If I could get it into words, I could escape the slow quicksand of almost any bad feeling, but now I’d lost my ability to even do that. I was in pain squared, pain cubed, pain to the nth power.”

“The thing is, I’ve helped people die. Not that they couldn’t have done it without me. And lord knows all too many people end up doing it alone. But I’ve kept my fair share of vigils at the bedsides of those with only a few moments, or days, or weeks to spare. I know many folk that might find this a fairly daunting proposition, but there’s something in that final fatal situation that I understand completely. I know what’s required inherently of me, and I know that I’ll do everything to be equal to this considerable situation. Everyone understands their role. One stays until the other can’t anymore. And the one who won’t be able to stick around is much more important than the one who can. And I find relief in the understanding and acceptance of the unspoken urgency in this arrangement. I’ll love them until they can’t be loved anymore.”

“In any event, I have accompanied several of my friends to that place where they can’t be escorted any longer. Where you remain with a dying person, accompanying them as far as you can go, ultimately finding yourself standing still while they’ve kept moving. Moving until that place where they stop, arriving at that terrible stillness that goes on way longer than any life someone might have led. You continue leading your life while they follow theirs into the great beyond. Being and nothingness. You love them until they can’t feel loved anymore, then you keep on loving them as if they were still there—as if there’s been a reprieve at the last moment and fate has reversed itself. It all turned out to be a bad dream that you both had and now get to wake from.”

“I did an interview recently where I was talking about, of all things, myself. And I said that sometimes I felt like I was more a persona than a person, designed more for public than private, and I illustrated this notion with the thing that Cary Grant famously said: ‘Everybody wants to be Cary Grant, even me.’ And the interviewer said, ‘Yeah, but no one really wants to be Carrie Fisher.’ I mean, he said it in the nicest way possible, and I completely understood what he meant. ‘Well, you know, actually there is an area where you should want to be Carrie Fisher,’ I told him. Because there is something in me that is joyous, that’s joyful. I don’t hate hardly ever, and when I love, I love for miles and miles. A love so big it should either be outlawed or it should have a capital and its own currency.'”