Review: Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge

Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge by Sheila Weller
My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

2.5 Stars

I tried to go into this biography with an open mind. Carrie Fisher wrote four memoirs and four semi-autobiographical novels. She told us a lot about herself in those eight books and countless interviews. She told us with tight writing and an insightfulness that was often painful. Still, I thought, perhaps there was more to be said, by those who loved and mourned her. So I requested the ARC. Not long after, Fisher's family disavowed the biography. Carrie's daughter Billie Lourd and brother Todd Fisher have spoken about the fact that Sheila Weller never knew Carrie Fisher, though that's not an uncommon thing since many biographers are writing about people who are dead. While anyone has the right to write a biography, if the work is just a great big long compendium of tabloid and magazine articles with little depth beyond what the writer subject had already offered up in their own writing, you don't have much of a book. That was one of my problems with A Life on the Edge. Too many passages read like a compendium of Page Six. Others feel like a less incisive rehash of what Carrie wrote herself. The caliber of the writing here was troubling to me. Exactly how many best friends can a person have over the course of twenty pages and a few years? Yes, she had many friends. Were they all her besties? The timeline, especially in the Star Wars years, feels like it's just smeared all over the place to include as many famous names as possible. Her parents were famous, and she was famous. They knew a lot of famous people. An accounting of names isn't insightful, and bestie status isn't insightful. Telling us that perhaps she had so many female friends, (like for instance, Joan Hackett) who were old enough to be her mother due to her early problems in her relationship with her mother, now that exploration might have been insightful. And why was fact-checking so poor? (It's the Cocoanut Grove Lounge, folks. Coconut Grove is a neighborhood in Miami, Florida. I checked the final copy of the book, and it was still wrong.) When you get sloppy with the small things, what do we think about the big things, such as people being willing to go on the record and talk about Carrie's last years, last days, last hours? I found little here that you can't get from reading the many articles there are about Carrie Fisher, and what Carrie Fisher wrote about Carrie Fisher. I think anyone who picks up this book is probably already sympathetic to struggles with addiction and mental health issues and how those issues can conspire to take some of the brightest stars from us. It's heartbreaking to think that Fisher relapsed because of all the stressors she faced in her last months. It's heartbreaking to think that we won't ever have her acerbic description of that relapse and recovery from it. I just wanted more from this biography. I'm not sure it's possible to get that. I think I should just go back and read Carrie's books again.




I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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