Review: Carrie Fisher’s memoir hints at juicy Star Wars gossip but fails to deliver
Book by Fisher, who rose to fame as Princess Leia in the Star Wars franchise, contains hazy recollections of an affair with Harrison Ford and excerpts from notes written during shooting that don’t reveal much
by Carrie Fisher
Blue Rider Press
2.5 stars
“I’ve spent so many years not telling the story of Harrison and me having an affair on the first Star Wars movie that it’s difficult to know exactly how to tell it now,” Carrie Fisher announces on page 49 of her brisk but vague new memoir, The Princess Diarist.
“Excellent, here we go,” any solid fan of the real Star Wars movies (certainly not the prequels) will think, settling in for the literary equivalent of an ice-cream sundae of the more offbeat flavours.
No problem, but she also draws the curtain over the interesting bits: their chemistry, their conversations, her point-blank impressions of a man poised to become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Or maybe we’re supposed to believe, as she insists, that Ford just didn’t talk a lot when they were together. In any case, we are left with a few interesting glimpses wrapped around excerpts of the diaries Fisher says she kept while shooting Star Wars and recently discovered. Even the diary bits are not very revealing, being the moody musings, including poetry, of a young woman on the cusp of 20 years old.
It’s clear from the final two chapters of the book, one of them titled “Leia’s Lap Dance,” that Fisher published this book with making money in mind. Her closing meditation on fame leaves Ford and the affair far behind. However, many Star Wars fans will read this book anyway or likely did so the instant it appeared.