#honesty the state of tv production is horrendous

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I swear I cannot wait 2 years for the next season. I need it now!

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Interview with author of “Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge”

Sheila Weller’s biography of Carrie comes out next month. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with her. Frustratingly, it devotes only a small amount of time to Carrie. I cut out all the rest.

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Between Girls and Carrie Fisher: A Life On the Edge, I actually wrote another book, The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour – and the Triumph of Women in TV News. 

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So, why from these two threesome books to Carrie Fisher?

The facile answer might be something like this: She is so fascinatingly complex, she is one woman with even more than three women inside of her: (1) the prolific creative (actress, author, script doctor, one-woman-show writer/performer); (2) the bearer of the burden of mental and behavioral challenges (bipolar disorder and an inherited propensity to drug addiction), and (3) everyone in Hollywood-and-beyond’s charismatic, witty, wise and generous best friend. Oh, and she’s also Hollywood Royalty —  let’s not forget that!

I loved her 1987 work of “faction” (her word for reality-based fiction), Postcards from the Edge. I found it revolutionary as women’s sophisticated truth telling. And I had been aware of the social significance of the Carrie-Penny parties. As well, I, too, had grown up in the Beverly Hills and Hollywood that had been her home, so I knew that world. My uncle owned the nightclub, Ciro’s, into which her mother, Debbie Reynolds, as a teenage starlet – along with Debbie’s friend “Janey Powell” – used to charm her way in order to shed her El Paso self and feel glamorous and worldly. My mother was a movie magazine writer and editor; she wrote articles on Debbie, and  once I drove with her the three block distance from our Beverly Hills Flats house to Debbie and Eddie’s to deliver an article she had written to the lovely Debbie (I still have her image before my eyes) for her approval. My mother not only wrote Debbie-and-Eddie stories, but after the grand scandal, she wrote Debbie-and-Eddie-and-Elizabeth Taylor stories. (And then, later: many, many Elizabeth and her husbands stories.) Taylor’s mother lived right up our street.

On top of that, my family had its own – not  un-public – version of a Debbie-Eddie-and-Liz scandal, with a beautiful woman breaking up a marriage. There was violence involved, and my mother had the kind of serious nervous breakdown, as they used to call it, that occasioned ECT, something that Carrie would later have. (I wrote about my family and that whole dramatic saga in my 2003 family memoir, Dancing At Ciro’s.)

So, bouncing around in my past was a familiarity with Carrie’s early life. When she died, in December 2016, the fact that she – bursting with honesty and wit; a healing stand-in for so many women who had age and weight issues and messy or atypical families but were embarrassed by them – was a feminist heroine hiding in plain sight became thrillingly clear. When, at the January 2017 Women’s Marches, Princess Leia and Carrie posters were held aloft by countless marchers, some not even born when the first Star Wars opened, everything came together and I knew she deserved a biography. I wrote a proposal and was lucky to have gotten a contract with the wonderful Sarah Crichton.

If you could point to one lesson you learned from researching Fisher’s life, what would it be? Your #1 takeaway?

Carrie was famously, stupendously honest about the parts of one’s life that most people hide. Sometimes, perhaps, she used that honesty in place of change, but other times she used it to inspire or nudge – or even half-shame – herself to change. Secondly, she persevered. Be killingly honest and persevere: that’s a double takeaway, I guess. Bipolar disorder is, as she put it, like living in a “war zone.” The hypomania (mild mania) makes one very productive, but the depression can be horrendous. Carrie worked through just about everything. Her output was astonishing, given the perilous, ever-ping-ponging emotional and mental state she lived in. Those of us who don’t have serious mood disorders can take inspiration from how much she did while challenged. I know I did.

What was the hardest thing about writing this book for you?

Two things: 1, getting people to talk. Some friends of Carrie’s held their memories close to their chests. I didn’t pester them if they wanted to stay private. But a remarkable number of people who knew her, in her expansive life (some who shared moments, some who shared deep friendships) did talk. And, 2, balancing honesty about some of her difficult moments with sympathy. Addiction – especially when one is young and came from a pampered environment, or any age and ashamed – can easily lead to unpleasant encounters and broken friendships and defensiveness that can seem mean. I wrote about those occasions, but after every bad encounter, I tried to explain the reasoning behind the behavior or in some other way say something positive. She deserved sympathy. And people outside of the industry: perspicacious fans – especially women – loved her. Loved her.

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Inuyashiki – 11 (Fin)

Early in this final episode, I was deathly afraid Hiro would somehow repair himself and pay Ichirou and his family a visit, and there would be no way Ichirou would be able to fight Hiro off and save his family; indeed, they’d likely be part of the ample collateral damage of such a fight.

That fear was only amplified when Ichirou showed his entire family the machinery within him, confessing to them that he might not be their Ichirou, but a fake. When his wife asks him to describe their honeymoon, he recalls every detail with such emotion both she and Mari end up bawling and embracing him…of course he’s their Ichirou. Only his son stays away, still understandably weary of this shocking news.

As for Hiro, his arms aren’t coming back, and he seems to have given up on destroying Japan. He shows up in Andou’s room to read the latest Jump, but Andou can’t allow the charade to go on, and calls Ichirou. Hiro splits before he arrives, and later watches Shion and her grandmother from afar, not daring to get too close lest his awfulness infect them any further. Hiro is also constantly hearing desperate cries for him to just effing die already for all the horrendous shit he’s done. He’s not in a good place.

As for Ichirou, honesty proves to be the best policy, as his family quickly embraces him (I love how his office didn’t even acknowledge him as the healing god on TV). He takes the fam out to eat and they take a riverside stroll afterward, in a wonderful display of family camaraderie.

In an earlier talk with his boy while walking home, Ichirou tells him how death makes life precious, and that now that he’s a machine he realizes he took being human for granted.  Even so, you can’t deny his family is being a lot nicer to him now that he’s a machine, when before, only his dog Hanako seemed to care whether he lived or died.

At the same time, perhaps they weren’t ever as disdainful as the earlier episodes depicted; maybe we were just seeing things from Ichirou’s woe-is-me perspective. It wasn’t as if he was the only member of his family feeling underappreciated or downtrodden.

In any case, that odd ominous sense of finality to the family interactions is explained by President Donald Trump of all people on the TV: Remember that Giant Asteroid? It’s still headed to Earth, where it’s expected to wipe out all life in three days. Trump basically tells the losers of the world to pound sand; he has no regrets about his life.

Such a comforting voice in trying times, is the Trumpster’s. A good chunk of the masses respond by engaging in widespread illegal activity. Something has to be done, and we know who needs to do it.

While I know the asteroid has been mentioned for some time, the shift from the Ichirou-Hiro conflict to Stopping the Asteroidocalypse still feels very sudden, and once this episode ended, I felt a bit like an entire arc had been awkwardly squeezed into one episode.

That being said, the execution, while hasty, still made an impact, what with Mari’s tearful farewell of her father (who promises he’ll be back) and the gorgeous shots of Ichirou floating around space. Unfortunately, even his formidable arsenal is ineffective at altering the asteroid’s course.

Enter Hiro, who followed Ichirou into space, and who believes the course will shift if he self-detonates on the asteroid’s surface. As horrible as he is, Hiro doesn’t want Andou or Shion to die, so like Ichirou, he’ll do all he can to stop that from happening.

When the night sky turns to day for a few minutes, both Andou and Shion seems to sense their friend is gone. For all the hundreds of people he killed in various awful ways (and if looking at things dispassionately), sacrificing himself to save the entire population of earth seems like a sufficient means of redemption.

It’s too bad then, that Hiro alone can’t save earth; he only blew up part of the asteroid; to finish it, Ichirou has to blow himself up as well. While I’m sure he didn’t like breaking his promise to Mari, he’d have liked her being incinerated by a meteor even less.

Also neither Ichirou nor Hiro in their current states were anything that should have been anywhere near humanity; they were simply too powerful, on both the good and bad side of things. They should have died when that alien ship squashed them. Turns out they got some bonus time, but now that time has ended.

The simple, quiet epilogue of Mari learning her manga won the competition in Jump (to Andou’s surprise as well) is the product of Ichirou lovingly supporting his daughter’s creative dreams, and earning back her respect and affection in return. No doubt the next work she publishes will be dedicated to her father’s memory.

By: braverade