Word: fisher
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...Carrie Fisher is an anomaly in Hollywood: a demonstrably clever celebrity. (I say demonstrably because plenty of celebrities are extremely clever; they just tend to keep it to themselves.) Fisher is the author of four novels, several screenplays and two autobiographical one-woman shows. Now she's written a memoir, or rather adapted it from her show of the same name, Wishful Drinking (Simon & Schuster; 163 pages...
...Fisher is, as she puts it, a "product of Hollywood inbreeding": her mother is Debbie Reynolds, and her father is the singer Eddie Fisher. After her father left Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor, Fisher grew up emotionally dependent on her mother, which presented difficulties because her mother was emotionally dependent on being famous. "I really didn't like sharing her," Fisher writes. "It seemed almost unsanitary."(See the 100 best novels of all time...
...pace of the one-liners in Wishful Drinking is a little relentless, but it's as valid a way as any of depicting the floodlit, perspectiveless world of fame where Fisher has spent her life. It probably didn't strengthen Fisher's tenuous connection to consensus reality when at 19 she became a pop-culture icon as Princess Leia in Star Wars. Fisher says that she hated Leia's Cinnabon hair ("Give me a hairstyle that further widens my already wide face!") and that George Lucas wouldn't let her wear a bra; instead, he made her tape down...
...what ties the book together is Fisher's struggle with addiction and manic depression. Wishful Drinking is her attempt to gather up a lifetime of memories scattered by electroshock therapy. At one point, she describes being admitted to a locked ward during a psychotic episode. She signed her commitment papers with a single word: shame. It's one of the few paragraphs in Wishful Drinking that doesn't contain a punch line; only when she writes about her brushes with madness does Fisher drop her manic stand-up shtick and let us see, for a moment, what it's there...
...starters, prices are being slashed on everything. And if the current malaise drags on, it will take a major bite out of inflation - one that could literally offset the decline in your portfolio. "The real enemy of retirement is inflation," notes Fisher. He points to this model: Say you have a $2.5 million nest egg that is growing 7% a year. In one scenario, you have no extraordinary economic events and normal long-term growth that produces inflation of 4% a year as you age from 65 to 95. In the second scenario, a severe recession knocks your portfolio down...