Postcards From the Edge

I've now read two Carrie Fisher books and I've loved them both. She is...was such a superb author chock full of quotable lines.

This novel is structured differently to anything I've read so far (which isn't saying a great deal) starting as postcards, then as a she says/he says diary, then as “typical” third person. The book itself is also split into parts that remind me of an indie movie from the 90s (which I think it actually became) whose style is very much a monologue of the protagonist.

I really enjoyed following along the character of Suzanne Vale. The only chapter/part I struggled a little with was Dysphoria, which felt much more like a gossip paper about Hollywood - it's not that it wasn't good, just that some of the reference and lifestyle was a little beyond my being able to connect.

All in all though, I love Fishers prose and I love that reading on the Kindle lets me highlight as I go along (37 highlights from this book!).

This is not so much a novel as a collection of diary extracts dressed up as fiction. It's divided into five main parts, which can be regarded as separate short stories.

1. Postcards from the Edge. Everyday life in a drug rehabilitation clinic, where addicts go to try to kick the habit. Told from two points of view in alternating segments: actress Suzanne Vale, and a young man called Alex who wants to be a writer. Presumably based on personal experience, this tells you possibly more than you wanted to know about the psychology and practice of drug addiction in America. Alex's tale is a brutally vivid and plausible case study of the addict's mentality, from the inside.

2. A Banquet of Crumbs. Suzanne returns to acting and gets briefly involved with a producer who chases women compulsively.

3. Dreaming Outside Your Head. Still trying to shed a reputation as an addict, Suzanne makes a bad film: everyday life in the film industry.

4. Dysphoria. Suzanne is between jobs and between men.

5. The Dating Accident. Suzanne finds a man.

This book is described by Steve Martin as “savagely funny and savagely revealing”. Tom Robbins says that it “shows us what despair is like when it refuses to take itself seriously”.

Fisher seems to me a fluent and witty writer, though it's the rather desperate wit of someone who feels obliged to joke on the way to her own execution.

It was made into a film in 1990, starring Meryl Streep, Shirley Maclaine, and Dennis Quaid; screenplay by Carrie Fisher. The screenplay must have been a major rewrite, because the book isn't filmable as it stands. Suzanne's mother has a very small role in the book, but evidently a much larger and different role in the film (played by Shirley Maclaine).

Though this is a fictional novel, it is heavily inspired by Carrie Fisher's own life and issues, with the names changed. There's a couple of scenes in here that she references in terms of her own life in some of her memoirs, so it was nice to recognise those.

It however didn't really engage me all that much, and I can't quite put my finger on as to why that is exactly. I liked the first part (the first 30 days), but then it lost me somewhere after that. It isn't a really long book though, so that wasn't a huge dealbreaker.

Right. So, not my favourite style of writing. That being said, I enjoyed this book, and I found it to be witty. And funny. Somehow, witty and funny have different connotations.

Essentially, this little novel relays the tale of the unhappy but hilarious actress Suzanne Vale. The first part is epistolary, detailing her time in rehab, her struggles and relationships with the other people in rehab. She makes it sounds tragic but somehow fun. Partway through the first chapter, we are introduced to a character named Alex who reminds me wayyyyy too much of someone I have known for years, and that's not a good thing. He's self-important but self-loathing, pretentious, cowardly, self-delusional, and misogynistic. And a coke fiend. So the reader gets events from Suzanne's more chill perspective, and then through his demented one. He is tough to handle. Especially when one has known someone like that.

After that, the writing style changes, becomes dialogue-heavy and almost post-modern, I guess? It's not a style I read often, but Ms Fisher is great at it. The rest of the novel details Suzanne's experiences with acting, life as a woman in Hollywood, depression, and her troubled love life. Ms Fisher is actually a really incredibly good writer and really hilarious. The style of the novel is difficult for me to read quickly, but that's more a personality thing, I think. It's short and punchy, and even though it's very definitely the 80s, it's still relevant. Her troubles and her lying in a depressed state in bed for nine days–though seemingly ridiculous–ring true for me, for people I know. Even if we've never literally done that, most of us have probably wanted to. Even though Suzanne is a wealthy actress and therefore privileged, her troubles are real. I feel as though she's the answer to the dearth of privileged white men writing about quarter- or mid-life crises or about their sexual coming of age, lalalala, because that is ALL over literature. So it's refreshing to have a female voice in there. She feels real, despite the wealth.

Carrie Fisher, continuing to be awesome.