Skip to main content

Review 14: Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

Wishful Drinking
I think we all have it in us to romanticise oblivion. The alcoholic writer; the drugged-up band; the tubby-custardised Teletubbies. It’s easy to see the excess and the self-disregard as edgy, rather than embrace what it would be like to actually be like to be in (or around someone in) that situation – desperate, bleak, sad. Wishful Drinking performs an odd tightrope act across this cultural tension.

The late Carrie Fisher wrote this to be performed as a one-woman show, and the sense of that performative element permeates the book. The language is casual and discursive, and a wry, dark sarcasm rivets the words to the pages throughout. This isn’t a lecture, it’s a conversation (although admittedly a one-way one, no matter how hard I tried).

What this also means is that Fisher is able to make her reactions very human. It’s easier to see her wry reactions to very dark and troubling things as blasé, but by staying as open and direct with the reader as she does, she’s able to maintain her connection to darker depths, which lends a sadness to her jokes and makes them more than surface.

Which isn’t to say it’s all gloom and doom with glitter on. This is a genuinely fun and funny read. There’s not much reference, surprisingly, to Star Wars – it feels like the annoying, tagalong little brother that she keeps trying to shake – but there are enough lighter moments to make this an easier read than you’d expect from a book about manic-depression and addiction. There are also plenty of grim bits, unrelated to her personal mental health but deeply related to the mental health of the rest of the world, with fans eager to let her know just how often they pleasured themselves thinking about her and so on. She gives these fairly short shrift, as you’d expect of gosh-darned General Leia.

The other thing you come away with is a good understanding of just how weird and messed up the Hollywood elite is. The incestuous co-mingling, and the unrealistic lifestyle expectations, are pretty much everything you’d expect of America’s unofficial royalty. It’s a wonder any of their kids have unwebbed fingers at all.

Overall, I found this a pretty poignant read, a woman who’s doing what she can to be fully open about her demons, using humour to gain access to them. If that’s what you’re looking for, go for it. If you’re looking for a ton of wacky anecdotes about Mark Hamill and Jabba the Hutt, you’ll be more disappointed. But if that’s your game, don't worry, I hear there's a shedload of that stuff on YouTube.

--

This is my fourteenth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 34: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 9: The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

The Portable Veblen is an odd read, and possibly not in the ways you’d expect. Picking it up, I assumed it was some sort of sci-fi or magic realist novel. Was a Veblen some sort of futuristic gun? A translation device? A highly treatable but somewhat embarrassing rash? In fact, as with so much in this world, it really only serves to highlight my troglodyte-level ignorance. Apparently Veblen is a reference to Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian socialist and sociologist living in America in the late 1800s. He essentially decried capitalism and proposed an alternative system to Marxism, and it is after this prominent thinker that TPV ’s main character, Veblen, is named. For me, the novel is really about contradictions between people and between families as they try to adjust from being purely individual to being part of a wider group. How do you decide what to compromise on and what to retain? What is an unhealthy hangover from your upbringing and what is a genuinely core part of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 25: With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial by Dr. Kathryn Mannix

There’s not much more predictable than death. Not the exact nature of anyone’s death, but the fact that we’re all going to hit the doom saloon at one point or another. And yet we fear it; avoid preparing for it; create unhelpful taboos around it. On a scale of dopey things to do, this ranks right up there with Morris dancing. This is one of the key messages of Dr. Kathryn Mannix’s With the End in Mind . Through a number of examples from her time working in palliative care, she explores what death really looks like and how to come to terms with it in an age increasingly concerned with preserving life at all costs. There are some genuinely moving points in the book, but for me none was more so than the first time she watches a consultant describe the dying process to a woman with a terminal condition, who is scared of the pain and loss of dignity she believes it to include. Mannix carefully recounts the process for us to benefit from too: gradually increasing tiredness, regular cycl...
Post a Comment
Read more