Intimate, hilarious, and sobering, Wishful Drinking is Fisher, looking at her life as she best remembers it (what do you expect after electroshock therapy?). It's an incredible tale: the child of Hollywood royalty—Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher—homewrecked by Elizabeth Taylor, marrying (then divorcing, then dating) Paul Simon, having her likeness merchandized on everything from Princess Leia shampoo to PEZ dispensers, learning the father of her daughter forgot to tell her he was gay, and ultimately waking up one morning and finding a friend dead beside her in bed.
Wishful Drinking, the show, has been a runaway success. Entertainment Weekly declared it "drolly hysterical" and the Los Angeles Times called it a "Beverly Hills yard sale of juicy anecdotes." This is Carrie Fisher at her best—revealing her worst. She tells her true and outrageous story of her bizarre reality with her inimitable wit, unabashed self-deprecation, and buoyant, infectious humor.
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Awards
-
Release date
February 17, 2009 -
Formats
-
OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780743583411
- File size: 89737 KB
- Duration: 03:06:57
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
Publisher's Weekly
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. -
Publisher's Weekly
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).
-
Formats
- OverDrive Listen audiobook
Languages
- English
Loading
Why is availability limited?
×Availability can change throughout the month based on the library's budget. You can still place a hold on the title, and your hold will be automatically filled as soon as the title is available again.
The Kindle Book format for this title is not supported on:
×Read-along ebook
×The OverDrive Read format of this ebook has professional narration that plays while you read in your browser. Learn more here.