Bookends: An unreal world

Even by Hollywood standards, Carrie Fisher is pretty crazy. She was born a Hollywood princess, and remembers her parents — Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher — as ‘not really people in the traditional sense’. Nor, obviously, was her stepmother Elizabeth Taylor, let alone her friend Michael Jackson.

And nor is she herself, shackled, as she feels, to the image of ‘a stern-looking girl wearing some kind of metal bikini lounging on a giant drooling squid’, as Princess Leia in Star Wars, aged 19, while these days looking, as she sportingly repeats, more like Elton John.

The drink and drugs did not help, particularly the LSD, and nor did analysis or AA; so she has lately volunteered for electroconvulsive therapy, hence Shockaholic (Simon & Schuster, £14.99), a sequel to Wishful Drinking.

ECT is ‘no big deal’ now, apparently — ‘like getting your nails done, if your nails were in your cerebral cortex’ — but it has affected her memory and vocabulary, which is a major drag for a writer.