One March morning three years ago, Carrie Fisher woke up next to a dead man. The man wasn’t her lover, but a good friend. To be absolutely clear: he was a painkilleraddicted gay Republican strategist who was in bed with Fisher because it was Oscar time in LA and space was scarce. Fisher — actress, writer, Princess Leia Amidala Skywalker of the galactic Rebel Alliance, former member of the Imperial Senate, and consort to the man who stiffed Jabba the Hutt — took the death very badly indeed. So badly she submitted herself to a course of electroconvulsive therapy. “Honey, I know this is a pain in the arse,” consoled a neighbour at the time. And Fisher replied, “If I could isolate the pain just to my arse it would be awesome.”

Wishful Drinking is a memoir inspired by the extreme emotions spinning off Fisher’s ECT. Only 170 or so pages long, it manages feverishly and hilariously to cover Fisher’s babyhood, plump-teenager angst, stint as front woman in the trilogy of Star Wars films, failed marriage to the singer Paul Simon and various drug-induced nervous breakdowns, without pausing for breath. Fisher has touched on some of the material before, in lightly fictionalised novels and screenplays such as Postcards from the Edge, but this time she shoots straight from the hip to the heart. The ease of the style, the thrill of the flow! The book is gone in an instant.

When she was little, Carrie lived in a big house in Hollywood with her mother, the actress Debbie Reynolds, most famous for her role in Singin’ in the Rain, and her father, the crooner Eddie Fisher, most famous for eventually leaving Debbie for his best friend’s widow, Elizabeth Taylor. I should say straight off that Fisher rarely bitches about the scandals that have beset her family — resentment is not her style — preferring instead to treat us to a raft of perfectly visual stories, like the one about her mother’s closet, which Fisher calls the “Church of Latter Day Debbie”. In this closet Reynolds would slip her tiny little feet into tiny little heels, pop a wig on her head and shimmer out of the door to Hollywoodland — and oh, how Carrie worshipped her (still does, they live next door to each other) and thought she might like to be an actress too. So she went to drama school in London, and at the age of 19 was cast in Star Wars and her life was never the same again.

In a mere eight pages (and four of those are mostly pictures), Fisher manages to tell you everything you really need to know about Star Wars, primarily about George Lucas. Fisher suspects, affectionately, that the man might not be entirely human: “He got Industrial Light and Magic to change his facial expression for him and the THX sound to make the noise of a face-changing expression.” Then comes Fisher’s fame, the opiates, the husband who left her for another man, and the ageing father with his zillion face-lifts and propensity for Asian brides.

As the chapters get smaller, the emotions expand to fill every available space. On page after page, Fisher is seamlessly, simultaneously crazy and tender, freely admitting to having a clinically split personality. “I named my moods Roy and Pam,” she writes. “Roy is rollicking Roy, the wild ride of a mood. And Pam is Sediment Pam, who stands on the shore and sobs.” You get the impression Roy wrote the book while Pam was at home cooking a seven-course banquet in blood; but you also feel that a night in with Pam would be way worth the hassle. Who else could break your heart by mentioning in passing that as a child she slept on the floor next to her mother’s bed because she wanted “as much of her company as she could get”, and then moments later recalls the night Cary Grant rang her to advise her that it might be a good idea to take marginally less LSD throughout one’s life than he had?

But consider this: how many celebrities writing about their life would neglect to say that they are one of the most highly respected and well-paid script doctors in Hollywood? Fisher doesn’t even mention this. The other thing she doesn’t mention (but then, how could she, so I will) is how ingenious she was in Star Wars. I must repeat that she was 19 at the time. And yet it was largely her talent for wry banter, the constant bump, bump of her big brain, that elevated the whole trilogy to a series of the most immaculate romantic comedies and gave the narrative its soul. And then there’s her beautiful skin: as moon-glowishly lovely as Juliet Binoche’s in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. What a joy to watch Fisher on screen! And she writes precisely as she looks: like a continually fresh and bold idea.

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