Hollywood Kid Carrie Fisher and Her Best Awful

Carrie Fisher opens up about the best awful times of her life–addiction, psychotic breaks, hospitalization and recovery.

For most of a life spent squarely in the public spotlight, Carrie Fisher thought the nights she couldn’t sleep or the times she couldn’t stop talking came with life in Hollywood. So too, she thought, of the crushing depressions between the “ups,” the dysfunctional family life, the trips to rehabilitation centers. It took a psychotic break in 1997- more than 15 years after her original bipolar diagnosis was made – to make Carrie realize something was truly amiss, even by the standards of La-La Land.

Like the other ordeals she’d endured, from her parents’ high- profile divorce when she was a toddler to her own struggles with substance abuse, Fisher ultimately chose to make her battle against bipolar disorder part of her public persona. Carrie told the world about her life with bipolar during an interview with Diane Sawyer on TV’s 20/20 in 2000, making her one of the highest-profile celebrities to speak publicly about having mental illness.

Writing about the ordeal took much longer. Having based her first best-seller, Postcards from the Edge, on her experiences in drug rehab more than a decade earlier, she started trying to write about her break and hospitalization in the same vein while fresh out of the psychiatric ward. Incorporating her characteristic wit proved a tremendous challenge, but the process ultimately produced another barely disguised autobiographical work. The Best Awful was released last January.

“I thought if I could ever get this to be funny, it would be brilliant,” Fisher says, her legs curled under her as she leans across the arm of a comfortably worn leather chair in her Beverly Hills home. “But it took a really long time. My life dealing with the bipolar situation was far from funny.” Carrie Fisher had always coped with pain by turning it into humor. And she’d already been through more than a Hollywood-sized share of personal turmoil.

The seed of her fame came along with her DNA, like mother Debbie Reynolds’ petite frame and father Eddie Fisher’s dark hair and brown eyes. Her celebrity grew, though, from an often-jagged, always-instant wit. That defense mechanism was forged as a toddler, when Dad left Mom for Elizabeth Taylor at her most glamorous, making headlines around the world. Her own movie career winding down, Reynolds carted her daughter and son, Todd, around the country as she toured with her nightclub act.

“I grew up in this kind of fishbowl existence and I figured, if people were going to say it about me, then I was going to say it first and I was going to say it better. It’s my way of trying to own a situation-either you have a problem or it has you,” Carrie says of looking for laughs in even the darkest moments.

Carrie Fisher was an actress-and a pop icon-before she turned to writing. Her ferociously intelligent perspective informed her performance as the sarcastic Princess Leia, a role which the three mega-blockbusters in the Star Wars trilogy elevated to cult-heroine status, as well as the wise-cracking, bitter best friends she portrayed in films like Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters and When Harry Met Sally.

But it was her voice as an author that truly emerged when she wrote Postcards from the Edge, the 1987 novel that was adapted into a hit movie starring Meryl Streep. In Postcards, Carrie first introduced her literary alter ego, Suzanne Vale, who overdoses on a similar set of substances, rehabs, and resumes her life.

Before the 1980s ended, Fisher had lived through her own marriage to and divorce from another superstar, singer and songwriter Paul Simon. There were also sporadic therapy sessions-including time spent with a psychiatrist who originally and correctly diagnosed her bipolar disorder years earlier when she was 24.

Carrie admits that she largely ignored the medication schedules the various doctors prescribed, due in no small part to her diet of illicit drugs. That regimen consisted of a blend of marijuana, acid, cocaine, and various prescription drugs, washed down with alcohol. It culminated in a drug overdose and trip to rehab. For Carrie Fisher, sobriety didn’t equal stability.

“I thought, ‘I’m a drug addict. Fine. That’s an explanation for this kind of out-of-control way that I am, so please just give me a break,'” she says. ‘”I’m going to be a drug addict here, an alcoholic, let me do that.’ But after a year, I got worse.” “For instance, someone called me a name in an argument. She said, ‘You bitch,’ or something, and I wept for three hours,” Carrie says of incidents during the decade leading up to her rehab and the 1997 break. “I was unable to stop. I would get stuck in traffic and would get so upset that I would take the phone and hit the wheel with it. I knew this wasn’t right.”

“I said, ‘I’ll go on this (medication) but with the understanding that I reserve the right to go off.’ I was very conflicted. I was like,’You’re telling me I can’t take the pills that I like to take that make me feel better, which seemed like the goal. But now you want me to take these other pills.’ I just thought, ‘It’s all PILLS.'”

As the 1990s began, Fisher acted less and wrote more, producing another pair of bestsellers: 1991’s Surrender the Pink, based on her relationship with Simon, and Delusions of Grandma in 1994. She also settled into a long-term relationship with powerful Hollywood agent Bryan Lourd and gave birth to daughter Billie in 1992. Even as Carrie put her substance abuse troubles behind and embraced her new role as mother, Lourd announced he was leaving her-for another man.

“Suzanne Vale had a problem, and it was the one she least liked thinking about: She’d had a child with someone who forgot to tell her he was gay,” Carrie wrote of her protagonist and alter ego in the opening lines of The Best Awful. “He forgot to tell her, and she forgot to notice.” Her self-image scrambled by the revelation of Lourd’s sexual preference, Fisher’s mood swings intensified. Further exacerbating the problem, she eventually decided to completely abandon the medication routine she’d only occasionally adhered to for more than a decade. And then, there was the non-stop talking.

“I never shut up,” she says of the times her mania would start to take over. “I could be brilliant. I never had to look long for a word, a thought, a connection, a joke, anything.” “Unipolar’ people or even people with no poles should envy me or any bipolar person because the upswing is the greatest–better than any drug, better than anything in the world.”

Such heady feelings never lasted, though, for either the author or the literary character she created. “Sometimes you didn’t want to be that person,” Fisher says. “You didn’t want to hold the dinner party hostage. And I didn’t have a choice. I’d keep people on the phone for eight hours. When my mania is going strong, it’s sort of a clear path. You know, I’m flying high up onto the mountain, but it starts going too fast.”

“I stop being able to connect. My sentences don’t make sense. I’m not tracking anymore and I can’t sleep and I’m not reliable.” When that last symptom started affecting her relationship with her daughter, she knew it was time to address the issue once and for all.

“Prior to having a child, I really did feel, it’s my business if I wanted to stop my medications,” Fisher says. “I no longer feel that’s so.” Seeing the confusion her erratic behavior caused in Billie-then approaching school age and now an energetic 11-year-old with long brown hair and a single freckle on her left eyelid, just like Suzanne’s daughter Honey in The Best Awful-sealed the deal. “It’s a much easier decision if you have a child. You really don’t want to be the person putting that look into anyone’s eyes after a while.”

Even though Fisher knew she needed help, it took the full psychotic break before she finally got it. In The Best Awful, Suzanne’s mental state follows a near-perfect spike, with her mania reaching a crescendo during a trip to Tijuana with a tattoo artist to buy prescription pain medication, followed by a free-fall into depression and finally, a stay in a psychiatric ward. Carrie says she streamlined her own ordeal and created some scenes in order to tell the story more effectively. The book’s introduction describes it as “Based on a Truant’s Story.” “Is it all plausible? Utterly,” she says. “I just switched it around. The funny thing about when you bottom out is that it’s so not dramatic, in a way. When I ended up going into the mental hospital, it was just this really weird feeling. I knew it was coming and I was powerless against something that was happening. It was just awful.”

Carrie chronicles her hospitalization in the novel, including a telling passage describing her frustration at being unable to perform the simple task of cutting pictures out of a magazine and pasting them into a collage, due to the effects of heavy sedatives she’d been given to end a string of six sleepless days. “That’s absolutely true,” Carrie says of the experience. “I just couldn’t do it.” Once her medication regimen stabilized along with her moods, she set about coming to terms with her experience the only way she knew how-by writing it down. “I had not elected to get into this situation, but now that I was in, you know, everything is (book) material,” she says. “Unless it’s not-then you’re in trouble. For a long time, I was in trouble, so it wasn’t material.”

When her writer’s block dissolved, she also started public speaking again, on 20/20 and to mental-health advocacy groups, with humor and without great concern for political correctness. Sitting on the steps of her front porch waiting for Billie to return from a school trip she recalls a speaking event that became something of a personal marker. “I went to this one thing where they gave me an award, and I’m funny about it,” Carrie recalls. “This woman comes up to me afterwards and says she’s offended, because her brother’s bipolar. I end up backstage with her and end up finding out that it’s not just the fact that her brother’s bipolar, but her sister has cancer and somehow, through all this, she feels like she’s not being paid enough attention to.” “So what we’re really getting down to is some other issue and I end up backstage weeping with this woman, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m not sure this is what I signed up for.'”

Reluctant or not, Carrie’s celebrity and unique openness about having bipolar disorder have made her an advocate and role model for many enduring the same journey. “The best part of it is I am able to get a lot of people coming up to me that are having a lot of problems, that don’t know what to do, that don’t have a good doctor, people who are suicidal, and I’m able to in some way help,” she says. “If I’m seen as sort of a poster recovery person for bipolar, then, OK.”

Carrie has embraced another part of herself she’s spent much of her life sniping at-the child of Hollywood within. “This town can be very silly,” she says. “The funniest thing my mother says is, ‘Well, you know, he was forgotten by Hollywood.’ And, yeah, that’s what Hollywood does. That’s sort of its job.” At long last, that’s OK with Carrie, who has satirized just about every LA stereotype during her literary career. “The only person that’s not going to be unhappy with not accepting something is you,” she says. “I live here. My daughter lives here and goes to school here, and her father lives here. I think places are more about people than the place.”

A life spent in and around show business, along with her sharp wit, fuel her celebrity interview show, Conversations from the Edge, on the Oxygen network, as well as regular appearances on Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown. Carrie’s unique background also makes her an ideal host for The Homes that Made Hollywood on the Home & Garden Network. “If there’s any history to this place, I like it,” Carrie says of Hollywood, “because there’s so little.”

Her own house is steeped in movie lore. The sprawling ranch-style adobe was once home to legendary actress Bette Davis, as well as costume designer Edith Head. With Carrie’s touch, its decor mixes the beautiful with the comical. Windows filter sunlight streaming into the sitting room. The wooden gate to the driveway bears a yellow sign warning “Beware of Crabs.” A similar sign on the way up the hill to the guest cottage behind her house reads “Clothing Optional From This Point On.” And a row of exquisitely delicate Japanese lanterns hanging from the roof of the rear patio is interrupted by an enormous paper-mache chicken.

On her Oxygen cable show, Carrie has twice interviewed her mother, who lives next door to her in Beverly Hills. She says her relationship with her father has improved, and is considering interviewing him on Conversations From The Edge. Carrie appears on TV regularly but is still best known for her work in film, cast in some of the biggest box-office hits ever. In her mind, though, she is more writer than actress.

“With acting, I don’t really have control,” she says. “With acting, somebody has to give me a job and I don’t like that. And acting deals with my appearance. I have areas of confidence and that’s not one of them. I’ve never liked my appearance. At one point, I should have and I didn’t.”

Though she still takes an occasional film role, most recently as the mother of a child who befriends a girl with schizophrenia in Stateside, she speaks of her acting career as if it occurred a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. While many actors bristle at the mention of roles that may have typecast them, Carrie says one of her favorite performances was the second episode of the Star Wars saga, The Empire Strikes Back. “It’s the ‘spiritual’ one,” she says.

“I liked the Woody Allen movie (Hannah and Her Sisters), even though I didn’t have that much of a part. I liked making The Blues Brothers, and I like When Harry Met Sally.” But, there are movie roles she’d just as soon forget. “There was this terrible film that I did just to go to Australia. It was a manic decision-I went so I could go off medication. I don’t remember what it’s called but it’s really bad. There’s one I haven’t seen, with Chevy Chase, called Under the Rainbow. I think that’s a really bad film and it was a really bad experience. We were all stoned, but I think I took the hit as the most stoned.”

Though she laughs now about her wilder days, she says sobriety is key to dealing with bipolar disorder. “You can’t even determine if someone’s bipolar unless they’re sober, so that has to be treated first, because all addiction and alcoholism looks like manic depression,” she says.

Carrie believes a blend of support and encouragement from family and friends-which she said she got from her mother, friends and Bryan, Billie’s father-is just as important in cases that don’t involve substance abuse. “If it’s a child, you can push them (into treatment),” she says. “If you feel like your child or friend or spouse is showing signs of this illness, if you can get them in touch with somebody else they can talk to and share their experience with and not just feel like they’re being told they’re ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ or ‘stupid,’ then they can relate somehow.”

“Generally, if they are properly bipolar, it’s going to be really chaotic. The best way to do it would be to get them to talk to someone else who has the same illness. They’re not going to listen to (someone who does not have the disorder) because you don’t have the same feelings.”

In addition to maintaining and monitoring her pharmaceutical routine and continuing therapy sessions, Carrie says working out regularly not only helps offset the weight gain experienced by many people on similar medications, but provides therapy of another kind. “I do sit-ups and that sort of thing and the treadmill,” Carrie says. “It helps, again, because you feel as though you have some control over something-make a decision and carry it through. I don’t like exercise, so I’ve had to learn to do things I don’t want to do.”

She needed extra stamina for the January release of The Best Awful and the publicity tour that followed. Carrie now focuses most of her energy on her next writing project, a novel in the more traditional sense, and her daughter. Though she doesn’t sit in one position, much less one place, for very long, the preoccupations and obsessions that led to her break seem as distantly past as the cinnamon-roll hairstyle favored by Princess Leia.

Carrie, once overwhelmed by the pain of her split with Lourd, says she’s now content living single. “I’ve done those relationships and I think it’s difficult to put someone through my life,” she says. “What male is going to move into this house and not feel sort of overwhelmed? I have other kinds of relationships and I love my daughter. She wants me to adopt a child–that’s more possible than me having that kind of relationship.”

Carrie has even grown close again with Lourd, with the parents enjoying a platonic relationship centered on their daughter, one she refers to as “Hollywood together-together but apart.” She’s even able to wisecrack about the breakup that once helped push her over the edge. “He never left me for a woman, so I’m still sort of his girlfriend,” she says with a quick, easy smile.

Printed as “Hollywood Kid Carrie Fisher and Her Best Awful”, Fall 2004