This past weekend while at Books A Million, I came across the late Carrie Fisher's last memoir titled The Princess Diarist. I picked up the book and began to skim it's pages and I was enthralled. I found myself coming across bits and pieces of her life that were just fascinating. I found myself following my boyfriend around the store reading what I found to him. He could see how amazed I was and surprised me with it later that day. As someone who was raised on Star Wars, Princess Leia has always been someone I have idolized. She was beautiful, fearless, determined, and everything that I wanted to be. So picking up this memoir was my chance to get to know the woman behind one of my childhood heroes. I was introduced to Carrie.
In the memoir, Fisher begins by recalling her childhood with a famous mother, the one and only Debbie Reynolds. She tells readers about watching her mother fade from the limelight, constantly trying to cling to her dimming fame and these struggles her mother suffered resulted in young Carrie deciding that she was not meant for the movie business. However as she grew into her teens, she was drawn to film and was cast in her first movie appearance and chose to attend acting school. Fisher recalls her introduction to George Lucas and the beginnings of her adventure into a galaxy far far away. She tells her readers the stories of how she became Princess Leia.
However, the bulk of this memoir Fisher dedicates to revealing her truth about an affair that she had with Harrison Ford during the filming of the first film in the Star Wars franchise, A New Hope. At the time, Fisher was 19, Ford was 33, and he was married. Reading Fisher's details of this story was quite the emotional roller coaster for me as a reader and fan. I found the idea of a married man pursuing a sexual relationship with a girl 15 years his junior, a girl who you could still call a teenager, quite abhorrent. However, this was Han Solo and Princess Leia and there were together in real life! The story that Fisher tells about Harrison saving her from crew members enacting a "friendly" kidnapping on her drunken self at George Lucas' birthday party made me give an audible "aww!" Han was saving Leia from danger outside of the movie and I was eating it up. However, this is a sad tale. It is a story about a man who clearly took advantage of a young and innocent girl. It is a story about a girl losing herself to sex and love and forever being changed by the course of these events.
Reading this memoir gave me a chance to see Carrie Fisher as a real person who has highs and lows like the rest of us. Fisher was more than just Princess Leia, she was an advocate for mental health, a fantastic actress, and a person. She will forever be greatly missed. And if I were you, I would go out and read The Princess Diarist, you won't regret it.
