The Princess Diarist

Carrie Fisher's memoir blends autobiography, reflection, and previously unpublished diary entries to tell the story of how she was cast as Princess Leia in the original Star Wars film, had a secret affair with her married costar Harrison Ford during production, and spent the next four decades living with the consequences of the role that defined her public identity.

Fisher opens by cataloging the cultural landscape of 1976, the year Star Wars was filmed, before arriving at the book's central revelation: While going through old boxes at home, she discovered diaries she kept during the three-month shoot, diaries she had forgotten existed. Their contents form the spine of the book. She also frames the memoir against the 2013 announcement that the original cast would return for new Star Wars films, an event that prompted her to reflect on her lifelong relationship with Princess Leia.

Before recounting the Star Wars experience, Fisher traces her path to the role. She grew up the daughter of two famous entertainers: her mother, Debbie Reynolds, a film actress whose career declined from major MGM musicals like Singin' in the Rain to nightclub acts in Las Vegas, and her father, Eddie Fisher, a singer whose career collapsed under a 13-year addiction to speed and the public stigma of having left Reynolds for actress Elizabeth Taylor. Fisher watched her grandmother, Maxine Reynolds, remark that it "used to mean something in this town to be Debbie Reynolds" (12), reinforcing the young Fisher's determination to avoid show business. At 17, she landed a small role in Shampoo, starring Warren Beatty. She auditioned for Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven and read well with actor John Travolta, but when Travolta dropped out and actor Richard Gere replaced him, Fisher lost the part. She enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama in England at 17, eager to live independently.

Fisher then recounts her audition for Star Wars. Director George Lucas held joint casting sessions with Brian De Palma, who was simultaneously casting the horror film Carrie. Fisher read for both directors, finding Lucas nearly mute and shy. She read the Star Wars script aloud with a friend and was captivated by its vivid imagery. Her final audition paired her with Harrison Ford, whom she had never met. When her agent called to tell her she got the part, she dropped the phone, ran outside into the rain, and was overwhelmed with joy. The pay was minimal and the flight to London was economy class, but she was Princess Leia, and she sensed she always would be.

Filming took place at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, outside London. Fisher had been told to lose 10 pounds before filming and was sent to a weight-loss facility in Texas, though she weighed only 110 pounds. Creating Leia's iconic twin side buns required two hours each morning. Fisher privately disliked the hairstyle but, afraid of being fired for not having lost the required weight, enthusiastically endorsed it. She found Lucas's stylized dialogue nearly impossible to deliver naturally, and his direction was limited to making things "faster" or "more intense."

The memoir's central narrative is Fisher's account of her secret affair with Ford during filming, which she calls "Carrison." She kept the story private for 40 years, in part because Ford was married with two children, and reveals it now because she would rather tell it herself than have someone speculate after her death.

Fisher arrived on set hoping to have a sophisticated affair but possessed almost no sexual experience. Ford, nearly 15 years her senior, struck her as intimidatingly handsome, and she felt tongue-tied around him. The affair began at a birthday party for George Lucas at the studio, where crew members pressured Fisher to drink and she became intoxicated. Ford intervened when some crew members began a jovial attempt to escort her away, pulling her free and ushering her into the backseat of his studio car. They kissed during the drive to London. When Mark Hamill, Fisher's costar, and a colleague pulled up alongside them, Ford told Fisher to fix her hair and act normal. After dinner at a London restaurant, Ford and Fisher took a taxi to her flat and spent the night together.

Their affair settled into a pattern: weekends together at Fisher's borrowed flat, weekdays on set behaving as though nothing had happened. Fisher could not confide in anyone because Ford was married, so she poured her feelings into her diaries. Ford's strong marijuana intensified her discomfort during their time together, and she never used the drug again.

The memoir presents the diaries themselves: poems, prose fragments, and journal entries that reveal Fisher's emotional turmoil at 19. She describes Ford as silent and scornful, writes that she can "charm the birds out of everybody else's trees but his" (115), and characterizes herself as someone being "sold to the man for the price of disdain" (111). The diaries document her compulsive need to be liked and her reliance on writing as a coping mechanism: She writes to keep thinking, fearing that if she stops writing she will start feeling. In the final entries, she describes herself as "a teenaged trespasser" (174) on the island of Ford's marriage.

Ford finished filming first. On their flight back to Los Angeles, he told Fisher she thought less of herself than she should, calling her "a smart hick" with "the eyes of a doe and the balls of a samurai" (107). It was the only remark he ever made acknowledging their intimacy. Reflecting from a distance of 40 years, Fisher characterizes the affair as "a very long one-night stand" (182) and defends Ford against any characterization as a womanizer, suggesting they were both lonely in what she calls "the land of permission" (182), where people behave in ways they would not at home.

Fisher then describes the disorienting experience of sudden fame following Star Wars' release in 1977. None of the three leads knew how to handle celebrity. The movie, she writes, "leaked out of the theater" and "poured off the screen" (194), generating an insatiable appetite for merchandise. She recounts the exhausting promotional tour, during which she noticed Ford quoting philosophers on talk shows and, insecure about having dropped out of high school, briefly hired a philosophy professor from Sarah Lawrence College to tutor her before abandoning the effort. She recalls driving past a long ticket line in Westwood, standing up through the car's sunroof to shout, "I'm in that! I'm the princess!" before ducking back down.

The book's later chapters explore Fisher's experiences at fan conventions, which she calls "celebrity lap dances" because both practices traffic in manufactured intimacy. She earned very little from the original Star Wars, signed away merchandising rights at 19, and later lost her savings to a dishonest business manager, leaving her a "poor rich person" (219). At conventions, she encounters fans for whom Star Wars is a defining life experience: families who treat showing the films to their children as a sacred ritual, women who credit Leia with inspiring their ambitions, men who tell Fisher she was their first crush. She registers the bittersweet irony that the men who found it easy to love her at 19 find it difficult now.

The memoir closes with Fisher meditating on her lifelong relationship with Princess Leia. She catalogs the many dimensions of that bond: answering questions about the character, defending her, resenting being overshadowed by her, and feeling honored to serve as Leia's "representative here on earth" (244). She poses the question of who she would have been without Princess Leia and answers simply: Without Leia, she would just be herself. "You know, Carrie. Just me" (246).