Though Carrie Fisher will be most widely remembered for her iconic role as Star Wars’ Princess Leia, her career spanned five decades and half a dozen disciplines — she was a voice actor, screenwriter, live theatre performer, memoirist, novelist, and a fervent activist who spoke openly about her own struggles with mental health and addiction.
So watch her movies this week (including all the classics she quietly rewrote and improved), but read the things she published, too. Here’s a list to get you started:
Postcards from the Edge (1987): Fisher’s first novel tells the semi-autobiographical story of a film actress working her way through rehabilitation for drug addiction by writing in a journal and sending postcards to her loved ones. Its absurdist humor was mostly well received, and it came to define Fisher’s writing style. She later adapted the book into a screenplay, which became a critically acclaimed film starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine. (It’s currently streaming on Amazon, iTunes, and a lot of other rent-online services.) Fisher’s 2004 novel The Best Awful There Is is considered an unofficial sequel.
Surrender the Pink (1990): A crassly titled romance novel, Surrender the Pink is about a soap opera screenwriter who falls in and out of love with an imperfect man, and finds it difficult to separate showbiz from reality.