This is one crazy book by one crazy lady. Carrie Fisher, aka Princess Leila, fires off her extraordinary life story in a series of one-liners and anecdotes. It's fast, it's furious, it's funny - in both senses of the word. Funny ha-ha but funny weird, too.

If the book reads like an extended rant, that's because it is. It's the literary adaptation of Fisher's one-woman US road-show, in which she takes the events of her life (having Elizabeth Taylor as a stepmother, marrying Paul Simon, nearly but not quite losing her virginity to Warren Beatty, alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness, to name but a few) and weaves them into an entertaining, riveting and ultimately uplifting account.

Fisher's tribulations would have beaten most people. And yet there is not a jot of self-pity in all of this. The book is, in that respect, the opposite of a misery memoir - and therein lies the appeal. Fisher is like the person in a car crash who, having broken almost every bone in her body, smiles cheerily at the paramedics and says: “Oh well, it could have been worse.” Dark humour and a cast-iron will are what keep the Carrie Fisher show on the road and this book is all the better for it.

Growing up as the product of “Hollywood inbreeding” (her mother was the actress Debbie Reynolds, her father the crooner Eddie Fisher), she had to share her parents, in particular her mother, with the world, and she didn't like that. But perhaps the biggest affliction of her childhood years was that, as the daughter of a very beautiful woman, growing up in a town obsessed with looks, she didn't make the grade. “I knew with the profound certainty of a ten year old that I would not be, and was in no way now, the beauty that my mother was. I was a clumsy-looking and intensely awkward, insecure girl.”

It would be reductive to identify that insecurity as the root of her troubles, but it's a theme she returns to again and again. That, and her bipolar disorder, for which she underwent electro-shock therapy (which she heartily advocates). One thing is certain, though: however fragile and lost she may have been in the past, at 52 Fisher has the devil-may-care chutzpah of a woman who has been there, done that - and got the straitjacket to prove it.

Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher; Pocket Books, £6.99; 176pp; Buy this book

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