Wishful Drinking

Starred review from November 3, 2008
Fisher has fictionalized her life in several novels (notably Postcards from the Edge
), but her first memoir (she calls it “a really, really detailed personals ad”) proves that truth is stranger than fiction. There are more juicy confessions and outrageously funny observations packed in these honest pages than most celebrity bios twice the length. After describing how she underwent electroshock therapy for her manic depression, Fisher then sorts through her life as her memories return. She predicts that by the end of the book, “you'll feel so close to me that you'll want to divorce me.” At one point, this daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher (“one an icon, the other an arm piece to icons”) hilariously diagrams her family tree of Hollywood marriages and remarriages to make sure her daughter's potential date is not a relative. Revealing that at 15 she got a vibrator for Christmas from her mother, she writes, “You might be thinking that a lot of the stories I'm telling you are over the top... but you can't imagine what I'm leaving out.” With acerbic precision and brash humor, she writes of struggling with and enjoying aspects of her alcoholism, drug addiction and mental breakdowns. Her razor-sharp observations about celebrity, addiction and sexuality demand to be read aloud to friends.

March 30, 2009
Fisher's larger-than-life personality shines through as she performs her raucous memoir with all the panache of the standup routine that inspired the book. Her comedic talents are on full display—particularly in her diagram of Hollywood inbreeding that ends with the ironic punch line that Fisher's teenage daughter is now flirting with the grandson of Elizabeth Taylor, who broke up Fisher's parents' marriage in the 1950s. As Fisher romps through her own affairs and marriages, and her bouts with alcoholism and drug abuse, she manages to see the funny side in all of it, even bipolar disorder (she calls her manic side Roy and her depressed alter ego Pam, after “piss and moan”). She does a fantastic impersonation of her mother, Debbie Reynolds, and an uproarious sendup of George Lucas, who wouldn't let her wear a bra in Star Wars
because he was adamant that there was no underwear in space. A Simon & Schuster hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 3).