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The Last Days of Carrie Fisher: An Exclusive Excerpt

On December 23, 2016, right before her favorite holiday, as the day was just starting in London, Carrie Fisher boarded United Flight 935 at Heathrow Airport. Accompanying Fisher was her constant companion, Gary, the French bulldog she'd adopted from a New York shelter. She took Gary everywhere: to talk shows, to restaurant dinners, and now to his own seat in the first-class cabin of this plane. The not-very-housebroken Gary, whose hot-pink tongue invariably hung sideways out of his mouth ("It matches [my] sweater," Carrie once told an interviewer), was like her canine twin. They were sweet survivors together: he, of a puppyhood of neglect; she, of a Hollywood childhood of glamour, popping flashbulbs, and headline-making scandal when the marriage of her parents, Hollywood's sweethearts Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, blew apart under the spell of the gorgeous, just-widowed Elizabeth Taylor.

Carrie subsequently survived early, sudden, international megafame—at age 20 in 1977—as Princess Leia, the arch-voiced galaxy-far-away heroine in that flowing white gown and those funny hair buns. Despite Leia's storybook royalty—her silky, almost-parody-of-feminine clothing and touching, repeated plea ("Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope"), made all the more plaintive because she uttered it as a hologram miniature—she was the fiercest hero of them all: ironic, tart, and already a Resistance leader, while her twin brother, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), was still a mere farm boy and her later love, Han Solo (Harrison Ford), was a cynical gun for hire. She was the only girl warrior among the boys, and she could hold her own better than they could. If second-wave feminism had a science-fiction stand-in, it was the Princess Leia created by Carrie Fisher.

(Picture above: Fisher poses in the iconic metal bikini from Return of the Jedi. As her career blossomed she observed, "Celebrity is just obscurity biding its time.")

As Carrie and Gary settled into their seats for the long flight home to Los Angeles, if she had wanted to use the hours in the sky to mull her accomplishments, she had plenty about which to feel satisfied.

More consequentially than surviving early fame, Fisher was also a survivor of an inherited propensity for drug addiction, a hushed-up overdose, and major bipolar disorder. Fisher's disorder could come on unpredictably, and for her, enduring it was like living "a war story." She talked about both of these challenges so frankly and so helpfully to others that in the early years of the 21st century "she completely kicked the stigma of bipolar disorder to the curb," says Joanne Doan, the editor of bp Magazine. Expert after expert would gratefully agree: Nobody took the shame out of bipolar disorder the way Carrie Fisher did.

Of course there was more, much more. Carrie had a brilliant, sage honesty and madcap personality—a crazy joyousness—pretty much unequaled in Hollywood. During the five-year run of her self-written one-woman show Wishful Drinking—her autobiographical late-career tour de force—she started sprinkling the audience, and her friends, with glitter. Actual glitter. She did it backstage at the Oscars; she did it at restaurants; she had special glitter-holding pockets sewn into her coat. Her house, tastefully decorated with antiques and folk art, was also chockablock with felicitousness: The tiles in the kitchen were embossed with an image of a Prozac capsule; one of her bathrooms contained a piano (don't all bathrooms have pianos?), and what she called "ugly children portraits" hung in her living room.