Gay men adore a woman who can simultaneously balloon out and melt down.

Fisher understands her demographic base and its accompanying psychology: at one point she recalls her triumph at a western-themed fundraising event for Aids research, when she caused the audience of butched-up make-believe cowboys 'to enthusiastically cry and laugh'. If your fame is waning – and Carrie's career peaked a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away when she appeared in Star Wars at the age of 19 – you can prolong it by defaming yourself. This, of course, is self-love by other means. She winces as she remembers her bloated days, when she had 'Sequoia-sized thighs' and was said by a waspish blogger to look like Elton John's twin sister. Mostly she chronicles her own addictions, her eating disorders and her booze intake, her manic depression and the electroconvulsive shock therapy that has zapped it.įisher is skilled at self-mockery. She also touchingly defends her friend Michael Jackson while admitting his extraterrestrial weirdness, and lets slip some confidential tattle about other falser friends – dealers, quacks, parents who pimped their kids – by whom Jacko was exploited.

She shreds the reputation of Senator Edward Kennedy by recording his randy, misogynistic repartee. She riffs on the arranged marriage of her parents, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, then hilariously derides the step-parents who replaced them when Debbie settled for another loveless match with a flatulent shoe tycoon and Eddie was scooped up by Liz Taylor, who felt the need for Jewish company after losing Mike Todd. Even silenced on the page, Fisher's voice is shrill, even shrieky, as if it were amplified, and her staccato sentences and truncated paragraphs leave plenty of room for out-loud laughter. Reading, in fact, hardly suits it: what she has written is a script for the eventual, inevitable audiobook. C arrie Fisher's latest collection of wisecracks and kvetching rants is less a book than a standup comedy routine that you read while sitting down.

Wishful drinking carrie