Postcards from the Edge at 35: How Carrie Fisher’s fiction put her back in control

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “This book is so much better than you think it’s going to be!” one Los Angeles Times reviewer enthused at the time – comparing Fisher’s debut to Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero before declaring it to be “a “serious” piece of work”. “Easy to raise the veil on Vale and see Carrie Fisher behind it,” friend and fellow mental health advocate, Stephen Fry, proffered in a recent foreword for the novel. It was during the writing of Postcards that she stopped thinking of herself as “an actress who writes”, and started describing herself as “a writer who acts” – embracing a love affair with language that began when Fisher was five years old, performing plays she’d written in her wardrobe for her mother, Hollywood’s grand dame Debbie Reynolds. “I still don’t think I feel the way I perceive other people to feel,” Fisher writes in the closing lines of Postcard’s epilogue.