Carrie Fisher told the Los Angeles Times this week that she is a major Dorothy Parker fan. The actress and writer has a new autobiography out that details everything from Princess Leia to battling addictions. Wishful Drinking has gotten great reviews, Parker connection or not. Fisher told the LAT:
Carrie Fisher: I started reading really early. I wanted to impress my father, who is unimpressable. For whatever reason, he may have given me the “Drunken Boat” by Rimbaud … reading was my first drug. I would just go into these books and never surface until it was over. My family called me “the bookworm,” and they didn’t say it in a nice way. I fell in love with words.
I never had the hutzpah to think that I would be able to do write. I would underline words that I didn’t know and sentences that I loved. By about 16 I wanted to be Dorothy Parker.
JC: You’re about the closest thing we have.
Carrie Fisher: Aw. I figured out the ways I am like her. Do you want to hear?
JC: Yes.
Carrie Fisher: She’s short. She was half Jewish. She had brown hair and brown eyes. She was an alcoholic or addict. And she married a gay guy!
But she married the gay guy again, then died in a small apartment in New York, with a bunch of cats. … These things I don’t want.
Fisher is on a book tour now, and seems to be enjoying it.