Fisher, Carrie. Postcards from the edge, New York : Simon and Schuster, 1987.
When Carrie Fisher wrote this comic and profound debut novel, she had known fame as an actress (through the Star Wars movie franchise) and as the child of Hollywood royalty: Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. Postcards from the Edge is the prism through which she interprets her personal life, family and the movie industry, all realised with striking candour, pathos and wit. Fisher chronicles her alter ego Suzanne Vale (in career and emotional meltdown) as she struggles with the fame game, drug addiction, relationship crises as well as deep-rooted family conflict, mostly involving her mother Norma, a thinly disguised Debbie Reynolds.
She delivers a late-Eighties portrait of Los Angeles that is no less revelatory of life lived in the fast lane, than that of the milieu of Jane Austen's Bath, a slower but no less problematic time. Fisher's prose style is dialogue-driven and explores different formats: the first quarter of the book composed in diary form before switching to conventional third-person narrative. It hardly surprises that Hollywood promptly filmed this book (in 1990) or that Fisher wrote the screenplay; nor that she has penned a further five successful novels. She continues to act in film and television. As does her mother.
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