Postcards From the Edge

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).