MEMOIR: Shockaholic, By Carrie Fisher, Simon & Schuster, 156pp. £14.99
CARRIE FISHER. Love her. Postcards from the Edge.Fabulous. Star Wars. Mum's the lovely Debbie Reynolds. Jumpers for goalposts . . . Sorry, bit of a slip there. The kind of slip Fisher makes now that she's had shock therapy.
That's not true, actually: it's the kind of slip Fisher has made in the whole of her health. Straight lines, narrative or otherwise, were never her strong point. In this new book, Shockaholic, she whizzes through topics and connections at breakneck speed. She's a good writer writing too fast, and her puns are beginning to lack traction. Anyone who is shameless enough to talk about " my bi-solar plexus", or "throwing good calories after flab", or to note that "As you get older the pickings get slimmer, but the people sure don't", or who wastes good wood pulp by speculating how the phrase "not to be sneezed at" originated without even attempting to find out, surely deserves some sort of punishment.
Fisher is irresistible when she's telling a story or revealing what feels like an unvarnished truth. To be similarly honest, Shockaholicis a pretty short book and not that great. It contains brief accounts of meetings with electroconvulsive therapy, the late Senator Edward Kennedy; Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor; the stepfather who bankrupted her mother; and her final years with her father, Eddie Fisher, the man who broke her heart when she was a child.
The standout item in this collection comes from 1985, when the young Carrie was set up, in quite an unsettling way, on a blind date with the bachelor senator Chis Dodd. He brought her to dinner in Washington with Edward Kennedy, Kennedy’s date and a married couple. Unfortunately for Kennedy and Dodd, Fisher had just finished her first stint in rehab. So she wasn’t just aware of being an ignorant, although famous, outsider in Washington, and of the humiliation of being pushed towards Dodd; she was on the Coca-Cola as the senators switched from red wine to vodka tonics. Kennedy started to bully her, asking if she was going to sleep with Dodd that night – “Why not? Are you too good for him?”
She refused to be defeated by this much older man, whose remarks became increasingly sleazy: “I’m newly sober you see and I’d have to be truly loaded to fall into bed with someone I’ve only very recently met. Even if that someone is a Democrat.”
This exchange went on the whole evening. Years later, the female half of the anonymous married couple rushed up to Fisher to say, “We’d waited for years for someone to take him on like that.”
The electroconvulsive-therapy episode is actually the dullest in the book, although Fisher is professional enough to know that this lone controversial topic would be her selling point this time. She really is a chancer. But then she charms you again by explaining that she was paid to lose the weight she’d gained after the ECT by becoming the public face of the Jenny Craig weight-loss organisation.
Electroconvulsive therapy is a big let-down in dramatic terms: “You’re given a short-acting anesthetic and a very effective anti-convulsant, you go to sleep for about 10 minutes, and your big toe moves a bit, which is all that remains of the bone-snapping thrashing of old.” She finds ECT helpful with her regular and grave depression – “I go in for a tune-up whenever I notice the onset of depression” – and blames it for some short-term memory loss and for her occasionally finding it hard to remember some words. She has obviously not been talking to any middle-aged females who have not had ECT, but then maybe she has been talking to them and forgotten all about it. It’s complicated. Carrie Fisher is the goddess of complication.
On the subject of Hollywood she is sure-footed. “People spend oceans of time ensuring they are camera-ready at all times.” This is her native soil: “I never went into showbusiness. It surrounded me from my first breath.” Her luxurious childhood was actually pretty grim: “The thing is, my parents weren’t really people in the traditional sense.” In fact, her parents’ first meeting, courtship and even marriage were engineered by the studios, in what Fisher calls an early reality-television experiment. It’s like The Truman Show.
When Eddie Fisher left Debbie Reynolds for their mutual friend Elizabeth Taylor, the scandal was enormous, ruining his career, according to his daughter, more than his drug-taking ever did. The turmoil became a byword for celebrity self-destruction. Carrie quotes Jacqueline Kennedy, when told some time after her husband’s assassination that censoring a book about it would make her look bad, as saying, “The only thing that could make me look bad would be if I ran off with Eddie Fisher.”
The most shocking moment in the book comes not in descriptions of her parents’ old excesses but in the brief mention of the Hollywood anaesthetist who, after dental procedures, was obliging enough to come to your house to provide you with additional morphine. “And I would extend my arms, veins akimbo.”
Her recovery is remarkable. Her wit is sharp. Her eye is keen. But this is one book too many from a brilliant memoirist who has run out of recordable life for the time being.
Ann Marie Hourihane is an Irish Timescolumnist
