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While Fisher admits that she draws on her personal experiences for her work, her characters have facets borrowed from several people. Surrender the Pink takes her thematically out of drug rehab and into romance rehab. It is hard not to read it as a roman a clef about the flopped relationship with Simon. It is the tale of a soap-opera scribe who goes to the Hamptons and finds herself stalking her playwright ex and his new girlfriend. In a frenzy of neurotic obsession, she steals into their house to eavesdrop. "I didn't really do any of that," she says, adding, "but I might." Just to make the flame of intrigue burn brighter, Simon has a new album with a song called She Moves On that might be mistaken for the wistful lament of an ex. She says, he says. A kind of call-and-response in the modern media garden.
While Fisher seems glib on the outside, her witticisms are emotional bandages in disguise. She's been seeing a psychiatrist regularly for 18 years, has been through 13 est workshops, and has sampled just about all 57 varieties of excess and illumination available in Western civilization.
She is an admitted Twelve Step-following, A.A.-attending, God-grant-me-the- se renity, flat-out, media-flaunting drug addict. But she is such a fetching one, not menacing or dangerous. Everyone's doing fine now. Fisher has remained "clean and legal" for nearly five years. And thanks for asking.
Director Nichols has been a witness to Mondo Carrie for most of her life and says, "There is a thing in her voice that is tuned so that in our ears there is something that says, 'This one is for me. This experience, this line, this job, this truth, this woman is especially for me.' That's the secret of her enormous charm, and she is so utterly and completely charming that she captivates people left and right. There is a kind of path of smitten people in her wake."
Fisher, now 33, takes her wacky, wise sensibility into her daily life. She says, "My personality has an emergency to it like a bad dress." At the drop of a premise, she can talk about Albert Camus's "amusing broodings" or the probity of Madonna's grabbing her crotch on TV. She proclaims a new movie idea, the story of Hitler's illegitimate son. She calls it The Doug Hitler Story. It is the tale of a young man who finds out at age 30 that he is the blood progeny of the Fuhrer. One night his mother gets drunk and screams at him, "You're just like your father! What are you going to do -- roll over me like the tanks going into Poland?" A little social criticism? "Show me a child with a simple, happy uncomplicated childhood, and I'll show you Dan Quayle," she says with a slightly snarlish smile. Like Woody Allen's Whore of Mensa, she is a high-I.Q., postmodern premillennial uberchick.
As an actress, in recent years she has broadened her casting range from just Princess to Princess Pal. In When Harry Met Sally . . . and in Hannah and Her Sisters she played the Friend much like herself: chatty, astute, troubled, warm, engaging, empathic and wry.