The Princess Diarist

by Carrie Fisher

if you’ve previously heard this story before, I apologize for requiring some of your coveted store of patience. I know how closely most of us tend to hold on to whatever cache of patience we’ve managed to amass over a lifetime and I appreciate your squandering some of your cherished stash here.

The scene from Carrie involved the mother (who would be memorably played by Piper Laurie). A dark scene, where the people are not okay. But the scene in Star Wars—there were no mothers there! There was authority and confidence and command in the weird language that was used. Was I like this? Hopefully George would think so, and I could pretend I thought so, too. I could pretend I was a princess whose life went from chaos to crisis without looking down between chaoses to find, to her relief, that her dress wasn’t torn.

“Carrie?” he asked. I knew my name. So I let him know I knew it. “Yeah,” I said in a voice very like mine.

It was raining. It didn’t rain in L.A. It was raining in L.A. and I was Princess Leia. I had never been Princess Leia before and now I would be her forever. I would never not be Princess Leia. I had no idea how profoundly true that was and how long forever was.

(The crew was mostly men. That’s how it was and that’s pretty much how it still is. It’s a man’s world and show business is a man’s meal, with women generously sprinkled through it like overqualified spice.)

Whimsy

Princess Leia Organa, formerly of Alderaan and presently of anywhere and everywhere she damn well pleased.

I looked at her aghast, with much like the expression I used when shown the sketches of the metal bikini. The one I wore to kill Jabba (my favorite moment in my own personal film history), which I highly recommend your doing: find an equivalent of killing a giant space slug in your head and celebrate that.

I’m no liar. I need you to trust that or stop reading.

Writing/storytelling

Back then I was always looking ahead to who I wanted to be versus who I didn’t realize I already was, and the wished-for me was most likely based on who other people seemed to be and the desire to have the same effect on others that they had had on me.

Life

I don’t just want you to like me, I want to be one of the most joy-inducing human beings that you’ve ever encountered. I want to explode on your night sky like fireworks at midnight on New Year’s Eve in Hong Kong.

You WERE, Carrie.

Any people who use language the way the British do—with colloquialisms like “twat” (rhymes with “fat”) and “cunt” (rhymes with everything)

Life. Jess

we were exploring the outer reaches of no speak,

Life

I could charm the birds out of everyone’s trees but his.

Whimsy

It seemed to calm me, getting anything that might be chaotic behind the eyes onto the page in front of me where it could do me less harm.

Writing /storytelling

That was the beginning of his realizing that I was the only person with whom he felt comfortable enough to be . . . well, still uncomfortable, but now at peace with finding the world a constant disappointment.

Whimsy

Thanks for the good times. Thank you for being so generous with what you have withheld. Thank you for being the snake in my grass, the thorn in my side, the pain in my ass, the knife in my back, the wrench in my works, the fly in my ointment. My Achilles’ heart.

Whimsy

Because what can you do with people that like you, except, of course, inevitably disappoint them?

Life

I wish that I could leave myself alone. I wish that I could finally feel that I punished myself enough. That I deserved time off for all my bad behavior. Let myself off the hook, drag myself off the rack where I am both torturer and torturee.

Life

I must be who I am and people adjust to it. Don’t try to rush or influence the decision. Do not let what you think they think of you make you stop and question everything you are. Surely between the various yous, you can find that you not only have enough going for you to keep you going, but to “take you far.” Maybe even to Alderaan and back.

Life

I was sitting by myself the other night doing the usual things one does when spending time alone with yourselves. You know, making mountains out of molehills, hiking up to the top of the mountains, having a Hostess Twinkie and then throwing myself off the mountain. Stuff like that.

Relatable whimsy

Trying relentlessly to make you love me, but I don’t want the love—I quite prefer the quest for it. The challenge. I am always disappointed with someone who loves me—how perfect can he be if he can’t see through me?

Life

I call people sometimes hoping not only that they’ll verify the fact that I’m alive but that they’ll also, however indirectly, convince me that being alive is an appropriate state for me to be in.

Life

I had feelings for him (at least five, but sometimes as many as seven)

Whimsy

Time shifts and your pity enables you to turn what was once, decades ago, an ordinary sort of pain or hurt, complicated by embarrassing self-pity, into what is now only a humiliating tale that you can share with others because, after almost four decades, it’s all in the past and who gives a shit?

Life

metaphor be with you!—that

Whimsy

I have the mixed blessing of being able to find the often obscurely hidden charm in many arguable objets d’art, not to mention animals and humans.)

Life