This is Michael Maxwell with the Sioux City Public Library and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today, I am recommending Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge by Sheila Weller. Sometimes I wonder how many authors have biographies on deck waiting for their subjects to pass away because surely Sheila Weller had been working on this masterful look at Carrie Fisher’s life long before we tragically lost the witty author and actress in the last days of 2016. Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge was published just three years later, and it offers such a revealing look at Fisher’s life that it at times felt almost voyeuristic. Carrie Fisher understood the power of transparency, though, and much of this biography is about how radically she shifted many cultural conversations regarding the issues that impacted her daily life.
One would not think that the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher could ever be someone considered “relatable” by the average American. It seems that Carrie Fisher was born intuitively knowing this, and that her life was a long process of disarming and demystification. Weller is not afraid to show every facet of the deeply neurotic Fisher, and readers learn that she could be imperious and bratty when wielding her nepotistic powers, but that she also had a heart of gold and a spirit of generosity that went unmatched while she was alive.
If you only know Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, this book will blow your mind. For example: Did you know that Carrie Fisher and author Salman Rushdie were great friends and that he was one of the last people to see her alive? Or that she worked as a script doctor on some of recent history’s most beloved movies, lending her trademark sense of humor to all kinds of different stories.
Check out Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge by Sheila Weller and many other biographies at the Sioux City Public Library today!
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