Pavel read and liked Buck's review of Wishful Drinking:

"When the original Star Wars trilogy came out, I was too young to have nourished any grotty pubescent fantasies about Princess Leia (though I guess by the time of Return of the Jedi, I was old enough to be confusedly excited by those harem scenes with...more When the original Star Wars trilogy came out, I was too young to have nourished any grotty pubescent fantasies about Princess Leia (though I guess by the time of Return of the Jedi, I was old enough to be confusedly excited by those harem scenes with Jabba the Hutt). But now that I’ve read Wishful Drinking, I kind of want Carrie Fisher for my girlfriend. Except that she’s my mother’s age. And she’s a recovering alcoholic/drug addict with bipolar disorder and a lavishly messed-up family. Other than that, though, she’s really great: she’s smart as a whip, wickedly funny and she swears like a teamster, whatever that is.

All the same, I definitely wouldn’t want her for a daughter, or even a distant cousin. When it comes to her family’s dirty laundry—of which there are piles and piles lying around, hopelessly soiled—she’s not what you’d call the soul of discretion:

My father is beyond likeable. I mean you would just love him. My father also smokes four joints a day. Not for medical reasons. So I call him Puff Daddy. But he is just adorable. There’s a reason he got all that high-quality pussy—except for the Miss Louisiana thing, and anyone can make one mistake.

How often do you find the word ‘father’ and the phrase ‘high-quality pussy’ in such close proximity to one another? And it takes a special kind of daughter to describe her mother’s sexual orientation in the following terms: ‘Not that it matters, but my mother is not a lesbian. She’s just a really, really bad heterosexual.’

I’m not up on Hollywood tell-alls, so maybe I’m overlooking some classics of the genre, but I don’t imagine there’d be that many celebrities out there who are blessed with either Fisher’s command of the American vernacular or her healthy perspective on her own importance. I can’t think of any other show-biz memoirists who’d be capable of writing a passage like this:

Speaking of graves, I tell my younger friends that one day they’ll be at a bar playing pool and they’ll look up at the television set and there will be a picture of Princess Leia with two dates underneath, and they’ll say “awww—she said that would happen.” And they’ll go back to playing pool.

Or this:

You know what’s funny about death? I mean other than absolutely nothing at all? You’d think we could remember finding out we weren’t immortal. Sometimes I see children sobbing in airports and I think, “Aww. They’ve just been told.”

See, that’s clever, but it’s also the teensiest bit profound, no? Okay, not Schopenhauer profound, but still.

Wishful Drinking is fluff, I guess, in the sense that it won’t change your life or even your lunch break. But it’s wise, witty fluff. To me, her relentless wisecracking got to seem a bit needy and defensive—he said, lobbing a giant rock from his glass house—but I think it’s to a person’s credit if, after enduring a dozen different kinds of awfulness, they can still find something genuinely funny to say about themselves. But even apart from the humour and the indiscreet revelations, Wishful Drinking serves a useful purpose: it reminds us Joe-and-Jane-Blow types that being ordinary, un-famous and essentially un-fucked-up is not such a bad deal after all.
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