Carrie Fisher--A Life on the Edge by Sheila Weller

Author:Sheila Weller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Surrender the Pink got some excellent reviews. The Chicago Tribune’s reviewer declared that Carrie should be “filed between Martin Amis and P. G. Wodehouse.” But not all were positive, and the book failed to earn the sales of its predecessor. It was a book about modern romance, not deeper themes. Carrie’s next book, Delusions of Grandma, actually plumbed such themes as death, family connections, and a search for intimacy.

Carrie was finishing the final edit of Surrender while writing the screenplay for Postcards, thrilled that Mike Nichols was mentoring her with it. “She gave enormous credit and love to Mike Nichols for what he taught her about writing for the screen,” Trish Lande says. Splitting her time between L.A. and New York, she stayed at David Geffen’s Fifth Avenue apartment to write the Postcards screenplay, and “one day,” Trish recalls, “we’re working on the galleys of Surrender the Pink at Geffen’s apartment and Carrie wasn’t feeling well, and in came Meryl Streep,” who was playing Suzanne Vale in the movie version of Postcards, “bringing Carrie chicken soup.” This was the start of a close long-term friendship between Carrie and Meryl.

“Between the book and the screenplay, it was also the beginning of Carrie’s real identity as a writer,” Trish says. As someone who now thought of herself as a writer, Carrie cultivated a friendship with Meg Wolitzer. Meg, then on the rise, is now considered, thirteen books in, one of the foremost novelists of her generation. Later Carrie would be cast in the film version of Meg’s novel This Is My Life, directed by Nora Ephron.

“I saw her in New York for a period of time,” Meg says. “We would hang out sometimes and have lunch. I remember once walking along Central Park West with her, both of us singing a medley of Sondheim songs. It was like being part of a free-form traveling cabaret. Another time, at lunch in a restaurant, the waiter came over, dropped the menus on the table, and stood there as if he was about to recite the specials but then in a quiet voice began to intone, ‘A long time ago, in a galaxy far away.’ I had a sense, from that, of the singular strangeness of Carrie’s life. She was an actress and a writer, but she was also, to many people, a vivid fictional character.

“For Christmas, Carrie gave me a bunch of gifts—I know she gave everyone gifts—including a giant stuffed-dog telephone. The mouth moved when the person on the other end spoke. Someone might call me and say something ordinary or funny or upsetting, and it would all come out through a dog’s mouth. That mix of high and low, dead serious and irreverent but always truly expressive, reminds me of what it was like to know her.

“When we’d talk at her place, we might be hanging out on her bed; that was what she did. There was a very comfortable teenage feeling about it that I really liked. She was so smart.

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