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She attended the Professional Children's School in Los Angeles with the offspring of other famous people. "My life was like this kind of enviable weird thing that I spent my life apologizing for." Mother Debbie rebounded, marrying retail footwear magnate Harry Karl, who eventually drank and gambled his way through his millions and into debts large enough to swallow her fortune too. The bright starry life-style collapsed by 1972 into a Saturnian world with concentric rings of emotional pain, financial instability and psychological drama. "My mom had the breakdown for the family, and I went into therapy for all of us," says Carrie. To dig their way out of the financial hole, Debbie went back to Broadway, starring in the musical Irene. Carrie played in the chorus behind Mom. By 16 Carrie struck out on her own and went to London to attend the Central School of Speech and Drama for 1 1/2 years. "It was the only unobserved time in my life," she recalls.
At 18 she suffered a serious success as the central dramatic character, Princess Leia Organa, in the great modern movie myth Star Wars. Fisher then moved to New York City, determined to seek her fortune without the Reynolds wrap. She became a regular homegirl of the Samurai Night Live gang. She was good friends with the late John Belushi and seriously dated Dan Aykroyd. She casually nurtured an acting career with two more Star Wars films, had a role in Under the Rainbow and a part in The Blues Brothers.
In 1983, at 27, she married singer Paul Simon. They had been friends for seven years, but the stormy marriage lasted only 11 months. Or so. Winds of the tempest that was their love affair blow through both her novels and through Paul's passionately painful songs like Hearts and Bones and Crazy Love Part II. The names have been changed, but the feelings haven't. "We are built more for public than private," says a Postcards character.
Somewhere along the line, drugs became a convenient escape route. She took the prescription drug Percodan for the ongoing heartbreak and pain, and she dropped LSD ritually for transcendent illumination. "Drugs became a way of blunting the sharpness of the juts. Juts-tapositioning oneself," she says. "I always wanted to blunt and blur what was painful. My idea was pain reduction and mind expansion, but I ended up with mind reduction and pain expansion." Her excesses eventually landed her in a hospital emergency ward, having her stomach pumped.
Writing rushed in to fill the void that had been occupied by drugs. Her first sprawling demi-autobiographical outpourings were bound and ungagged between the covers of Postcards in 1987. The gist of the haywire parable is that fame and fortune are no shield; things can go very wrong in rich families with smart, talented people too. The book is less about the outlaw romance of drug abuse than about the process of picking up the pieces. She explains, "The facts don't change, just the fiction that you make up about them."