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I generally find I get more out of a book by reading it in print, whether that’s electronic or paper. I’m a visual learner, so written words stick in my head better. So I don’t often listen to audiobooks, unless I’m on a very long drive where I must be the driver instead of the passenger, or perhaps one has just fallen into my lap. But a few books really do beg to be listened to, and Carrie Fisher’s last memoir is one of those. The actress and writer was one of those people who would have been fun to hang around with sometimes — and that’s coming from someone who enjoyed “Star Wars,” of course, but isn’t a fanatic. Personally, I loved her just as much or more in “When Harry Met Sally,” for example. She was just sardonic, smart as a whip, multitalented and funny. All those qualities show up in The Princess Diarist, a mostly entertaining little book about her experiences as Princess Leia, on and off screen.
Fisher found journals she wrote while filming the first Star Wars movie (“A New Hope,” if younger folks need that to be clarified) and decided to share them, along with plenty of musings about that time (whatever she could recall decades later as a decidedly older and, as she keeps saying, fatter person whose physical appearance at said later date could shock and dismay many people who have watched the earlier films so many times that her young self is all they come to expect to see) and the years since that relate to her portraying one of the most iconic film characters ever. Most of this book is a very long introduction, almost, to those diaries, and further musings after the diaries themselves are read (by her daughter, Billie Lourd).
When The Princess Diarist was published, the news that came out of the book was that Fisher and Harrison Ford had an affair during the filming of the movie. And Fisher goes into a lot of detail, not about the actual sex, mind you, but about her feelings and thoughts as a 19-year-old girl having an affair with a dashing but rather taciturn older man who, she knew, was going to be a Star, capital S. She does warn readers, repeatedly, that the diaries themselves are going to be rather painful to listen to, but if they really, really want to proceed, they can, but … OK, then. And it’s true: they are the ramblings of a young woman who’s dealing with all the pain and angst of a love affair that contained no love. I didn’t find myself as glued to the book during that section, my mind sometimes wandering, as I did the rest of what she wrote. But they are revealing in that they still give a window into the mind of a very smart and talented woman who, though she quit formal education in the 11th grade to sing with her mom, Debbie Reynolds, had a bright future wielding the spoken and written word.
It’s just fun. Not a masterpiece, not her best work, but a revealing piece of her portrait, and one that fans will cherish.
Rated: High. There are roughly 15 uses of strong language, more uses of moderate language, and a number of crude sexual references (at least half of these relate to her understanding that her likeness was the object of much self-pleasuring in young and old men).
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