The Princess Diarist

by Carrie Fisher

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.)

I have filled him in to be unobtainable, disinterested, attractive and bored with my company. My ideal mate. Someone to endure, never to enjoy. I am totally at his mercy. I suffer through the silence, imagining that he is suffering my company. That I am merely an alternative for nothing better to do. I’m frightened of the power I have given him over me and of how he will almost certainly abuse it, merely by not being fully aware he has it.

I will allow it to hurt me. Eat away at my insides, as it were—as it will be. As it always has been. Why am I so accessible? Why do I give myself to people who will always and should always remain strangers? I have always relied on the cruelty of strangers and I must stop it now. I am a fool. I

Maybe no man is an island, but some sure look like one. All safe and dry and looming on your horizon. But the current was against me and who was I kidding? His island was already inhabited and here I was, a teenaged trespasser. All I had to do was make the most of being adrift.

I didn’t want him to see that I “belonged to him”—it was bad enough that I knew it. I didn’t want him to know it, too. I kept it from myself for almost 2 months now, calling it everything from “physical” to a big mistake.