Recently, a young actor at a party complimented actress turned novelist- screenwriter Carrie Fisher on her career transition, saying, "Gee, it must be great now that you are a writer. Now you get to call the shots."
"Not really," she replied, "but at least I get to fill some of the syringes."
These days Ms. Fisher is needling the world with several potent concoctions. A movie adaptation of her best-selling snort-and-chortle novel, Postcards from the Edge, has opened big. It features Fisher's screenplay directed by Mike Nichols, with Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine as the star-worn daughter and mother. There is also a new paperback edition of her novel to add to the media jet stream. And Fisher's lovelorn modern romance, Surrender the Pink, has just been published.
All that has created a high-angle trajectory of fame that has given her a cultural hat trick: both books are on the best-seller list, and the movie has grossed more than $23 million in its first three weeks.
Whether in a book, in cinematic ventriloquism or in the dangling conversations of her radio and television interviews, Fisher's words work like a Rorschach test. What she says is often what you feel. She feels it too. "I am a spy in the house of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me," she explains. "I am somewhat nonplussed by the event that is my life."
The grist for her artistic mill is the jagged facts of her life. To sort these out you have to suspend normal conventions of reality and place yourself in her screenplay childhood. "Other people's fantasy was my reality," she says.
Her mother was known on marquees around the world as Debbie Reynolds, the queen of spunky beauty from the '50s. Dad was Cool Daddy-o singer Eddie Fisher. "I was born of a golden womb," says Carrie. People like Lucille Ball and Jimmy Stewart used to come for dinner. Candice Bergen was always at their house because her best friend was the family baby-sitter. Unfortunately, father Eddie just barely had time to bequeath his eyes and voice to Carrie and sire her brother Todd before he gallivanted off with famous film fatale Elizabeth Taylor. The whole affair ended badly and publicly. As her legacy from the broken fairy-tale family, Carrie got a wounded heart and an emotional predilection for "short Jewish men -- preferably musicians." Eddie's parental abdication left the kids to be raised by their extraordinary mother.
Even at an early age, Carrie was thoughtful and inquisitive. "She was always asking questions," recalls Debbie. "She was always searching for answers. A seeker." To cope with her mother's klieg-illuminated life, Carrie repaired to a world of private musings in journals and diaries. "I always wrote," she says, "even when it was just bad poetry like 'My nose runs/ my mind follows.' "