“If my life wasn’t funny, it would just be true, and that’s unacceptable.” — Carrie Fisher
Fisher said those words while promoting her novel The Best Awful on CBS Sunday Morning on February 1, 2004, answering Rita Braver’s question about how a mental hospital stay could be funny. The book drew on her breakup with talent agent Bryan Lourd, who left her for a man, and on her 1997 psychotic break. Fisher and Lourd’s daughter, Billie Catherine, was born in 1992.
The habit of turning pain into material started long before the novel. Her parents were actress Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher, and her father left Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor when Carrie was 18 months old. At 28, Fisher was taken by ambulance to Cedars Sinai Medical Center, where doctors pumped her stomach. She later spent 37 days in New Beginnings at Century City Hospital and said in a July 31, 1987, interview, “Getting my stomach pumped was my bottom.”
The 1997 break was the one that changed how she understood herself. She said she’d gone 6 days without sleep and had stopped breathing. She said the experience made her fully accept her bipolar disorder. Before the Braver interview, Fisher had spent weeks in inpatient psychiatric treatment and 5 months in outpatient care, and she was still taking medication.
After The Star published a piece titled “Carrie Fisher’s Tragic Life,” Fisher said in a January 25, 2004, interview that the story would come out “their way or my way.” That instinct to tell it herself became a stage. She put the whole account into the one-woman show Wishful Drinking, which opened at the Geffen Playhouse on November 15, 2006.
Her 2008 book of the same name printed a version of the line about life needing to be funny. When Matt Lauer brought it up in a 2008 TODAY interview, Fisher said her life had better “get funny fast” or it would haunt her. The answer she gave Braver holds up as the plainest version of how she lived: the laugh was the only terms on which she’d let the truth stand.