Book Review – The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher

Title: The Princess Diarist

Author: Carrie Fisher

Publisher: Bantam Press

Publication Date: 24th November 2016

Format: Hardback

About the book:

The Princess Diarist is Carrie Fisher’s intimate, hilarious and revealing recollection of what happened behind the scenes on one of the most famous film sets of all time, the first Star Wars movie.

When Carrie Fisher recently discovered the journals she kept during the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she was astonished to see what they had preserved—plaintive love poems, unbridled musings with youthful naiveté, and a vulnerability that she barely recognized. Today, her fame as an author, actress, and pop-culture icon is indisputable, but in 1977, Carrie Fisher was just a (sort-of) regular teenager.

With these excerpts from her handwritten notebooks, The Princess Diarist is Fisher’s intimate and revealing recollection of what happened on one of the most famous film sets of all time—and what developed behind the scenes. And today, as she reprises her most iconic role for the latest Star Wars trilogy, Fisher also ponders the joys and insanity of celebrity, and the absurdity of a life spawned by Hollywood royalty, only to be surpassed by her own outer-space royalty. Laugh-out-loud hilarious and endlessly quotable, The Princess Diarist brims with the candour and introspection of a diary while offering shrewd insight into the type of stardom that few will ever experience.

What I Thought:

The Princess Diarist is the sort of memoirs of Carrie Fisher. When this was first released it was quite widely talked about in the press due to the reveal of Carrie’s affair with Harrison Ford during the filming of the original Star Wars film. I was quite tempted to pick up the book when it was first released, but never got around to it, and then obviously Carrie passed away around Christmas so it felt a bit strange. I saw the book on offer in Tesco towards the end of January and finally got around to reading it during my long weekend at the end of February.

I found the book to be a really interesting insight into Carrie’s life, if you’re expecting the full sordid details of the affair this isn’t the book for you, what you’ll find when you open it is the story of a young woman, who was raised in a showbiz family but way still woefully unprepared for the level of fame that being a lead character in Star Wars would bring her, and her wish to appear grown up and experienced in front of the rest of the cast.

The Princess Diarist is a mixture of Carrie’s recollections of that period of her life and how being Princess Leia had impacted her life since, and extracts from the diaries she kept at the time. I found the book to be a really interesting read, the story of three people who were suddenly thrust into the spotlight as the stars of a film that burst into the world  and had a popularity and a reach unlike anything before and anything since. Carrie Fisher clearly struggled to deal with the fame, as I expect anyone would, but still had a sense of humour through it all.

Would I recommend it?

I would recommend The Princess Diarist to any Star Wars fan, it gives a unique insight into the world of one of the biggest movie phenomenons in history. It’s not a long book either, perfect for a rainy afternoon read.