Carrie Fisher's first book, published when she was thirty-one—right after she did a stint in rehab, and only three years after she came to terms with her bipolar disorder diagnosis—is really best described as semi-autobiographical. I've read all her memoirs, and Suzanne Vale is an author surrogate if ever there was one, with the whole plot of Postcards from the Edge consisting of satirized real-life events from Carrie's turbulent life. In the resulting, highly-quotable novel, movie actress Suzan

"The positive way to look at this is that from here things can only go up. But I've been up, and I always felt like a trespasser. A transient at the top. It's like I've got a visa for happiness, but for sadness I've got a lifetime pass. I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere."

"Suzanne wondered when she had begun to be more of a personality than a person. When her shrink had pointed it out to her, she'd felt as though she'd actually known it for a long time. When she was twenty-one she had written in her journal, “I narrate a life I'm reluctant to live.""

"She wondered how long she was going to stay in bed. She wondered if she would awaken one morning—maybe tomorrow morning—and feel like bounding back into her life, refreshed and unafraid. She wanted so to be tranquil, to be someone who took walks in the late-afternoon sun, listening to the birds and crickets and feeling the whole world breathe. Instead, she lived in her head like a madwoman locked in a tower, hearing the wind howling through her hair and waiting for someone to come and rescue her from feeling things so deeply that her bones burned. She had plenty of evidence that she had a good life. She just couldn't feel the life she saw she had."

Carrie Fisher's first book, published when she was thirty-one—right after she did a stint in rehab, and only three years after she came to terms with her bipolar disorder diagnosis—is really best described as semi-autobiographical. I've read all her memoirs, and Suzanne Vale is an author surrogate if ever there was one, with the whole plot ofconsisting of satirized real-life events from Carrie's turbulent life. In the resulting, highly-quotable novel, movie actress Suzanne is trying to get her life back in order after overdosing and spending a month in a drug clinic—the parallels to Carrie's biography are glaringly obvious, and can be found even in little throw-away lines such as Suzanne's penchant for falling in love with gay men, or having dated a senator.The woman could write—for a new author, this was a really strong debut, and I think part of the reason this was such a hit (it was even adapted into a star-studded movie a couple of years later, which is great in its own right, but bears little resemblance to the novel), was that she simply stunned everyone with her talent and insight. Celebrities certainly talked about their struggle with addiction long before she did, but this kind of openness was a first: She was brutally honest, and never once tried to make excuses for her choices and behavior. Pardon me if I may tend to blur the lines between author and protagonist, but they are essentially one and the same. I don't think there ever was anyone in Hollywood who was as disarmingly candid and as endearingly real as Carrie was—her dry wit and deadpan humor are hard to be rivaled, and she lets it all bleed into Suzanne.There are a few flaws though, which is where my pretty average rating comes in: The first is the way the narrative style changes within sections—part of it may have been the horribly formatted ebook I read, but I found it confusing to follow in parts: From the epistolary prologues and epilogues, we pass through sections of journal excerpts, alternating monologues and bits of dialogue, before settling into a more traditional third-person narrative for the latter half. I don't think the switches in style and especially perspective added to the story, and I would've preferred it if the whole book had been written as actual "postcards" from Suzanne's point of view. The second is that there is virtually no plot to speak of once Suzanne gets out of rehab, so for over half the book. This was however likely intended to show how mundane the process of getting a life back on track after a crisis is, so I don't want to give it too much of a negative bearing—and I didn't mind it, because the feisty wit compensates for it. The third and final aspect I didn't care for is the character of Alex. I understand why he was in there and why we were given his point of view as well, but I found his parts overwrought, contrived, and obnoxious—ultimately, I just could not stand the guy, and felt like he was robbing me of precious time I'd rather have spent in Suzanne's fascinating head.As with Carrie's later memoirs, while you try to deal with all the dazzling jokes she flings at you, you'll get a sense of how brilliant she was, yet also how exhausting living inside her mind must've been. She was incredibly introspective and in touch with her feelings, as perhaps only the famous, recovering addict daughter of an even more famous Hollywood pair could be. She possessed an awareness of having no idea what "normal" is, but struggled all her life to find something resembling normality and stability, anyway.—————