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

"When the original Star Wars trilogy came out, I was too young to have nurtured 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 nurtured 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 the same paragraph? Right, not very. 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 exactly 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 fame:

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 there's 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 isn't it also just the teensiest bit profound? 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 good, witty fluff. True, Fisher’s relentless wisecracking starts to sound needy and defensive after a while—he said, casually lobbing a rock from his glass house—but I think it’s to her credit that, despite her freakish Hollywood existence, she’s still human enough to laugh at herself. Come to think of it, what could be more freakish than that: a human being in Hollywood? It must get awfully lonely for her.
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