Fisher opens with her guiding philosophy: “If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable” (17). She believes tragedy can be transformed through humor and the passage of time.

A few years earlier, her close friend, Greg—who, she notes, was a gay Republican and not her boyfriend—died in her bed. He had flown in, fresh from running a presidential campaign, to accompany Fisher to Oscar parties. When questioned about sleeping in the same bed as a Republican, Fisher reveals she once had sex with Senator Chris Dodd as humorous  evidence of her loyalty to the Democratic party.

Greg died from a combination of sleep apnea and OxyContin use. He once shared an office with a young George W. Bush, who would deliberately fart in the office before Greg’s meetings as a prank. When their friend, Dave, tried to comfort Fisher, calling Greg’s death “a pain in the ass” (21), she deflected with gallows humor responding, “If I could isolate the pain just to my ass, it would be awesome” (21). Fisher notes that she’s addressing this painful story at the outset, so the rest of the book can focus on lighter material.

Fisher was born on October 21, 1956, in Burbank, California, to singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds. Her father’s biggest hit song was “Oh! My Papa,” and her mother starred in Singin’ in the Rain and received an Oscar nomination for The Unsinkable Molly Brown (losing to Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins). Reynolds was pregnant with Fisher during her films A Bundle of Joy (1956) and Tammy (1957). Fisher jokes that, at her birth, her mother was put under anesthesia and her father fainted, leaving her virtually unattended.

Fisher notes that her parents and fellow celebrity couple Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor were inseparable. Eddie served as best man and Debbie as matron of honor at Mike and Elizabeth’s wedding. Fisher’s brother, Todd, was named after Mike Todd, violating the Jewish superstition against naming children after living people. When Mike Todd died in a plane crash,  Eddie flew to console the widowed Elizabeth, began an affair with her, and left Debbie within a week.

Fisher presents an elaborate family tree of subsequent marriages. Elizabeth left Eddie for Richard Burton, whom she married, divorced, and remarried. Debbie married shoe tycoon Harry Karl, who eventually squandered both his own fortune and hers. Harry had previously married actress Marie McDonald twice. After Marie died of a drug overdose, their three children came to live with Harry and Debbie, and Fisher shared a room with her stepsister. Debbie later married Richard Hamlett, whom Fisher calls “this sociopath,” who also stole her money.

Eddie eventually married a woman from China named Betty Lin, who died after 10 or 15 years. Fisher married Paul Simon—a short, Jewish singer just like her father. They eventually divorced, and Fisher had her daughter, Billie, with talent agent Bryan Lourd. On the Taylor side, Elizabeth and Mike Todd’s daughter, Liza, married Professor Hap Tivey and had sons Quinn and Rhys. Years later, when Fisher’s daughter Billie was interested in Rhys and they attempted to figure out whether they were related, Fisher told them they were “related by scandal” (43). Fisher offers this complicated family tree as evidence of what she calls “Hollywood inbreeding,” comparing it to the intermarriage of European royal families. She references King Charles II of Spain, who was so inbred that his aunt was his grandmother, and he drooled, smelled, and had seizures.

Fisher grew up in a modern house she called “the Embassy,” featuring eight pink refrigerators and three pools. She describes her mother’s enormous closet as “The Church of Latter Day Debbie,” where her mother transformed into a glamorous movie star with the help of hairdresser Sidney Guileroff. Around age 10, Fisher realized she wouldn’t match her mother’s beauty and decided to develop her humor or intelligence instead.

She notes that her stepfather, Harry Karl, wasn’t good looking, but because he “was wealthy and well-groomed he was said to be distinguished looking. That's ugly with money” (52). Fisher later learned his daily barber was actually a pimp and suspects his visiting manicurists were sex workers. At 16, her mother moved Fisher and her brother to New York to escape her marriage to Harry and put Fisher in the chorus of her Broadway show.

One evening, Todd accidentally shot himself in the leg with a blank. Debbie called a cab to take him to the hospital and phoned Fisher, instructing her to rush home before the police arrived to hide Karl’s guns and Todd’s marijuana. She hid the guns in the washing machine and destroyed the drugs. When police arrived, they were more interested in asking about John Wayne than investigating. They eventually determined the gun was unlicensed, and Debbie was taken to the station at 4:00 am for booking, fingerprinting, and a mug shot. Reporters later asked if she had shot Todd for publicity. The next day’s Daily News featured Debbie and Todd’s photo, but the headline read “Picasso Dies.”

Thirty years later, Todd hailed a cab in New York and discovered the driver was the same man who had taken him and his mother to the hospital that day. The cabbie showed Todd a piece of the bloody rag he’d kept from that night and had Todd sign it.

Fisher writes that Reynolds now lives next door to her and habitually offers to mark her possessions with stickers designating them for Fisher or Todd after her death. Fisher says the items she most wants are the blue beaded dress with blue fur from her mother’s closet but believes it has disappeared.

Fisher’s view of her mother evolved from childhood adoration through teenage annoyance to adult admiration for her loyalty, reliability, wit, and tireless work ethic. However, Reynolds remains eccentric. While she was married to Hamlett, she repeatedly suggested that Fisher act as their surrogate and carry a child for them. When Fisher objected, Reynolds justified the idea by insisting, “We live in a very strange world” (64). Fisher’s grandmother Maxine, the voice of reason, declared the idea not right.

Fisher describes her family as blue-blooded “white trash,” with her mother’s people from Texas and her father’s from South Philly. Maxine once locked seven-year-old Reynolds in a closet as punishment. Young Reynolds retaliated by spitting on all of Maxine’s dresses, then requesting water to spit on her shoes. Maxine later explained she didn’t know this was wrong because “[they] did not have Cosmopolitan magazine in those days” (65).

After Hamlett stole Reynolds’s money, Reynolds joked that Eddie Fisher was starting to look like the good husband. Fisher describes her father as “beyond likable,” noting he smokes four joints daily and she refers to him as “Puff Daddy.” Fisher says reading his autobiography Been There, Done That (1999), which detailed his sexual conquests, made her want “to get [her] DNA fumigated” (66). In Eddie’s book, he suggested that Reynolds was a lesbian, but when The Enquirer called Fisher to comment, she clarified that her “mother is not a lesbian! She's just a really, really, bad heterosexual” (66).