A Handsome Mess: Carrie Fisher’s Brave Brilliance

After he died in 2010, Fisher inherited Eddie’s immense diamond pinky ring. She and her siblings Joely and Tricia believed the jewelry was worth thousands. Then Fisher discovered the stone was, fittingly, a fraudulent. “He genuinely meant to give bona fide diamonds of only the finest color, cut, and clarity,” Fisher writes. “Ultimately [he] was only able to offer cubic zirconium.”

The Best We Can Do

“When you are a survivor, in order to be a really good one, you have to keep getting in trouble to show off your gift,” Fisher writes in Wishful Drinking.

Fisher would valiantly struggle and thrive, with long periods of sobriety in between occasional relapses. She also worked tirelessly on her mental health, and in later years found enormous relief in electroconvulsive therapy, which she promotes extensively in Shockaholic. “ECT has forced me to rediscover what amounts to the sum total of my life,” she writes. “I find that a helluva lot of it fills me with a kind of giddy gratitude.”

A eminent party thrower who filled her home with Hollywood friends and family, Fisher seems to have found many moments of joy despite the challenges she faced. And most importantly, she never lost her belief in the power of humor. When Billie told her mother that she also wanted to be a writer, Carrie had some advice:

“I say…’you have tons of material. Your mother is a manic-depressive drug addict, your father is gay, your grandmother tap dances, and your grandfather shot speed!’ And my daughter laughs and laughs and laughs, and I say, ‘Baby, the fact you know that’s funny is going to save your whole life.’’’

As always, Fisher’s mother and brother were there offering support in their own zany way. “She was upset about my drug addiction—what mother wouldn’t be,” Fisher writes. “But on some level she wasn’t as upset as she was with my failure to do a nightclub act.”

Carrie Fisher died on December 27, 2016, of cardiac arrest after a drug relapse. Debbie Reynolds died the next day. Always fascinated by death, Fisher had already pictured the media coverage surrounding her demise, with typical irony and wit. As she wrote in Shockaholic:

“What you’ll have of me after I journey to that great Death Star in the sky is an extremely accomplished daughter, a few books, and a picture of a stern-looking girl wearing some kind of metal bikini lounging on a giant drooling squid, behind a newscaster informing you of the passing of Princess Leia after a long battle with her head.”