JAN - The Princess Diarist

January review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher, 2016. [celebrity memoir category]

The Princess Diarist is Carrie Fisher's rediscovery of her journals from the set of the first Star Wars film, and it is breathtaking. Bookended by her own retrospective explanations, her journal pages are just vague enough to be universal, but understandable within the context she has painted. There is a vulnerability and a raw quality to her memories that is a side of Carrie Fisher was have never seen, and having that parallelled with the sardonic honesty of her later years is particularly intriguing. I greedily devoured her words, letting myself drop into her mind and feel what she felt, see how she saw. It was fun to peek inside the nascent beginnings of Leia, but it was so much more interesting to read Carrie talk about those beginnings in terms of the rest of her life.

I, like many thousands of girls my age, was in awe of Princess Leia. I loved Princess Leia for all the things she represented in the original Star Wars trilogy: she was the badass princess who didn’t need rescuing, she was the only woman in pretty much the whole shebang, she was loud and funny and she got shit done. She was my solid entry into the world of science fiction and I will always be grateful to her for that. Since then, she has grown as I have, and when she reentered the world of Star Wars as General Organa, I was absolutely thrilled. Leia put in the work and fought her way up from being the empty, underestimated princess of the first films. Carrie was not satisfied with her being the sister or the lover: she infused Leia with simmering starpower that exploded in the hearts and minds of girls everywhere, and Leia became one for the ages.

When she passed, I read article after article about her; I watched her interviews and added her books to my TBR pile. I remember when Wishful Drinking came out, I remember being slightly saddened to learn that Carrie Fisher sort of regretted Star Wars and that she had some problems with addiction--I was seventeen and still in the heady days of not interrogating something that makes me uncomfortable, something that Carrie has since taught me to do. I didn't read Wishful Drinking (but it's on my list now), and I let Carrie Fisher fade back out of the forefront of my mind for a while longer. I don't remember exactly how she came back, but I remember all of a sudden being stirred by her writing and her honesty, and Leia opened up so much more to me.

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Sure, Princess Leia taught me a lot, but I think Carrie Fisher taught me more. Her frankness about her personal problems and mental health issues taught me to be ok casually mentioning my medication or my anxiety. Her flagrant disregard for societal standards helped me to realize how great a woman's body is when she loves it, and that nobody else's opinion matters. When the real world started to get shitty with Doomsday *ahem* I mean Election 2016, an image began to circulate of Leia in her white dress with a gun, saying "A Woman's Place is in the Resistance." I love it, but I don't think that single image goes far enough. I want a triptych: I want Princess Leia in her white dress; I want Undercover Leia in her stolen bounty hunter suit; and I want General Organa in her vest and circle braid. This woman has shown me so many different ways of how I can be, and I want to keep honoring her the only way I know how: by continuing to Be.

Thank you, Princess Leia. Thank you, General Organa. But most of all, thank you Space Mom, for all that you've given me. Hope you're having a grand old time hexing people like Harvey Weinstein up in Heaven.