I came late to the Carrie Fisher as an author party. I knew she had written certain ones, forgotten she’d written other ones, but never read anything. Plus, I only had a small inkling of wanting to read anything (mostly right after she passed). But then I found The Princess Diarist. Thinking it was the last memoir she wrote, I figured it was as good as any other to start with. Afterall, why not do the most recent one? It would have the most updated information. Sadly, the copy I got was still saying she lives in, not she lived in, but that was fine. Her voice across space and time would still work.
And that voice was a conversational one. It tends to be one of my more favorite forms of writing because A) it is a style of writing I use (I like talking to my reader as if we are in person talking) and B) it makes things feel less technical and academic and more friendly, personal and even fictional story telling. She has three parts to the book. The first is her telling stories of the three months filming the first Star Wars. (You know the real first one. The one that started it all back in the late 1970s. )
This is about her affair with Harrison Ford. She tells a few behind the scenes stories (about how she felt about herself, her parents, her career or lack there of, events that happened, events that probably shouldn’t have happened, schooling) but mostly it is her reflecting on how she first slept with Ford, how Ford made her feel, what she did to get his approval, how they kept it quiet, but also how it would morph into their public lives, and so forth. She also talks about the diaries she kept then.
Then we have the diaries. Which I skipped over during the initial reading. (I know! I know! It is the Princess Diarist.) This was because the first few entries I read were dry, slow, nothing interesting. They didn’t say anything or so I was feeling. I bookmarked the start and end of them, and went to part three, which is more of the same as the first part. Talking about the three months. I started this review before finishing part three, but I’m guessing she’ll talk about her round up of ending the filming, probably something more about that hair. Maybe even more about the infamous bikini.
Did I love this book? No. Did I like it? Yes. Will I read others by her? Maybe. Do I have a case of “don’t meet your heroes” even on the page? Oh yes. But then again, maybe there is a lesson in there for us. If nothing else, it does tell me that she might have been a Bad A$$ babe who strangled the slug that put her in that shiny monstrosity, but she was human.