eBook, 267 pages
Published Nov. 22, 2016
In 1976, Carrie Fisher was a teenager filming a movie, with an all-consuming crush on her costar. And it just happened to become one of the most famous films of all time -- the first Star wars movie. When she recently discovered the journals she had kept, she found them full of plaintive love poems, unbridled musings with youthful naiveté, and a vulnerability that she barely recognized. In revisiting her diaries, Fisher ponders the joys and insanity of celebrity as well as the absurdity of a life spawned by Hollywood royalty whose lofty status has ultimately been surpassed by her own outer-space royalty.
I don’t think I would have liked this book nearly as much as I had if I’d read it instead of listening to it on audiobook, narrated by Carrie Fisher herself.
I enjoyed the first half where Carrie Fisher talks about her younger self and her memories of the set of the first Star Wars movie. Once I got to her actual angsty teenage diaries I got interrupted and then never got back into them. So today I am DNF-ing the book.
While the the diaries do resonate with my memories of me being at that age, it proved impossible for me to get back into the mood of reading them once the interruption had caused me to put down the book. The first half is definitely worth reading especially if you are curious about some behind-the-scenes information about the actors.
The first book I read by Carrie Fisher was [b:Wishful Drinking|4961048|Wishful Drinking|Carrie Fisher|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347698159s/4961048.jpg|5026857], a work in which she exposes herself in a very sincere and passionate way. From then on, I gained a deep admiration for the actress, realizing that she has faced good and bad times throughout her life.
Because of her tragic death last year, I decided to read [b:The Princess Diarist|26025989|The Princess Diarist|Carrie Fisher|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1482921522s/26025989.jpg|45949491] and, once again, I "met" Carrie Fisher in her rather intimate writing, not only revealing an old diary from her days in Star Wars IV, but also punctuating a few other moments of her trajectory as an actress and as the personification of Princess Leia Organa.
The book is very interesting, being a very sincere and harsh telling of her life experience. Fisher acknowledges to have been quite insecure in the mid-1970s', a point that has affected her in subsequent years. As I …
The first book I read by Carrie Fisher was [b:Wishful Drinking|4961048|Wishful Drinking|Carrie Fisher|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347698159s/4961048.jpg|5026857], a work in which she exposes herself in a very sincere and passionate way. From then on, I gained a deep admiration for the actress, realizing that she has faced good and bad times throughout her life.
Because of her tragic death last year, I decided to read [b:The Princess Diarist|26025989|The Princess Diarist|Carrie Fisher|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1482921522s/26025989.jpg|45949491] and, once again, I "met" Carrie Fisher in her rather intimate writing, not only revealing an old diary from her days in Star Wars IV, but also punctuating a few other moments of her trajectory as an actress and as the personification of Princess Leia Organa.
The book is very interesting, being a very sincere and harsh telling of her life experience. Fisher acknowledges to have been quite insecure in the mid-1970s', a point that has affected her in subsequent years. As I began to accompany the actress on social networks, I realized that her long learning process lasted until the last day of her life. One of the last tweets of the actress was about the critics of the fans about her aging and the arduous passage of time.
The book is very beautiful, especially when the actress shows her reflections about her aging, her relationship with her mother, her relationship with Star Wars fans and, most interestingly, her relationship with Princess Leia, always punctuated by several behind-the-scenes photos. The ending is quite sad, marked by another very emblematic photo of the actress's career.
I was quite saddened by the end of reading, feeling that we all lost a great human being, very sensitive and who still had much to teach us much more about humanity.
Sigh. Definitely round up to 3.5. I loved the journal entries. She was so...introspective and her voice was so FAMILIAR! Painfully so, in some ways. I love her writing style. Amusingly, Harrison Ford seemed more like a concept rather than a person, so if that was her intent (or if that is how she felt) it definitely worked. I never got a sense of the man in any of the things she wrote about him. Seems appropriate, I guess, considering the circumstances.
She was a great writer. I'm going to miss her.
