Carrie Fisher’s ‘The Princess Diarist’ One Year Later

In the wake of Carrie Fisher’s death following an in-flight heart attack last year, she left the last of 15 books, The Princess Diarist.  The book deals, perhaps fittingly, with the cultural events that first made her famous—the filming of the original Star Wars and the relationship she had with her much older co-star, Harrison Ford.

“When I was a young man, Carrie Fisher was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen,” tweeted the day of her death. “She turned out to be bright and witty as well.”  Martin caught some heat about his wording, and eventually deleted his tweet. But the same  basic sentiment was there in a : the journey from the highly sexualized, urgently sought starlet to distinguished afterthought, which seems to happen, for women in film, in the blink of an eye. Fisher deals with this issue in the book, when she discusses the hordes men who confessed to her that they masturbated to her in. “If I’d known about all the masturbating I would generate…let’s just say I have mixed feelings. Why did all these men find it so easy to be in love with me then and so complex to be in love with me now?”