I’m not sure what I was expecting from this book. The hype around it was that it was from the diary that Fisher kept while filming Star Wars in 1976.
Again, I’m not sure what I was expecting, but…this was not it.
Yeah, technically there were some diary entries. They made up the middle third of the book or so. But if you’re a SW fan or even just a Fisher fan, there’s nothing here that you couldn’t find in the cringey notebooks kept by any lovesick teenager.
The big revelation that you’ve probably already heard about is that she had a fling with the much older Harrison Ford for the few months they spend in England during filming. If you’re looking for personal details…keep looking. Fisher makes a point of keeping the graphic parts of the story to herself.
But…if you’re just looking for the inside scoop on the filming of one of the most iconic movies of all time, well…you won’t find that here, either.
Honestly, I can’t find much reason at all for this book. Despite the marginally scandalous affair she had with a married man, there’s not a lot here. Fisher goes to pains to point out how much she loves the fans, but spends long paragraphs making fun of the kinds of things that they say to her again and again.
She likens signing autographs at conventions to giving lap dances. I’m not saying she’s wrong, but it’s hardly flattering to either her or the legions who pay to spend a minute or two with her after standing in line for hours on end.
Finally, Carrie sums the whole book up in a single line – and not even at the end of the book – when she says that it was nearly 40 years ago and who gives a shit?
Not me, Carrie. Not me.
This is the second time I’ve discovered that I’m not the fan that I thought I was. The first time was at Star Wars Celebration in Indianapolis when I realized that, no matter how much the movies meant to me as a kid, there was no one I was willing to give an entire day of standing in line with sometimes fragrant scifi fans to. Not Lucas, not Hamill, and apparently not Fisher, either. Not with that attitude.
The other thing that surprised me was that, despite her reputation as an in demand script doctor, she’s not a strong writer. There’s nary a cliche that she isn’t willing to whip out and dust off if it gets us to her mediocre teenage angst poetry a little sooner.
I plowed through her book in just a couple hours on a Saturday night, but not because it was satisfying. Not at all. It was such a light, poofy read that I was nearly halfway through when I noticed that the story that hadn’t started yet wasn’t likely to.
Carrie was a willing participant in Ford’s adultery, make no mistake. There was no grooming or coercion. But he was allegedly the adult in the situation and no matter the state of his marriage at the time, I can’t get past the fact that a man in his thirties had no issue having a fling with a teenage co-worker.
This the first of Carrie’s books I have read and I was really looking forward to it. But I don’t think I’ll seek out any of the reast of them, lest I lose a little more respect for her. And I’ll never look at Harrison Ford the same way again, either.