She was 19 when they met on the set of Star Wars – and began a three-month affair. Fisher comes clean about the most ‘obsessive, confused’ time of her life • Scroll down for an exclusive extract from Fisher’s memoir

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that it has taken Carrie Fisher so long to fess up. The famously candid actor and memoirist has been asked numerous times whether there was a real-life romance on the set of Star Wars, to mirror the relationship between Princess Leia and Han Solo. No, of course not, she would invariably reply: she was a teenager, Harrison Ford was 14 years older, they couldn’t have been more different, what a daft idea.

Now she has written The Princess Diarist, in which she calls on the journals she wrote at the time, to reveal that she had an intense affair with Ford. The diaries, and accompanying poems, make for painful reading. Here is a 19-year-old riddled with self-loathing and angst, already in therapy but yet to be diagnosed as bipolar, pretending to be a woman of the world. She falls obsessively in love with Ford, who, while happy to sleep with her, does not appear to feel the same way.

Fisher has always written about herself with self-lacerating honesty (notably in Postcards From The Edge, the fictionalised account of an overdose). Why has she waited so long to tell this story? A number of reasons, she says, talking down the line to me from Los Angeles, her voice thick with bronchitis (our interview in London was cancelled when she fell ill). The most important was the discovery of the journals, which she found in boxes under the floorboards when she was renovating her house. “I hadn’t seen them in 40 years. After all this time, I had genuinely forgotten they existed. And I thought they were this incredible archaeological find.”

Enough time has passed, she says, to enable her to tell the story. “It wasn’t just my secret to keep,” she says, meaning that Ford was married at the time of their affair, to Mary Marquardt. Shortly afterwards, he divorced, and married ET screenwriter Melissa Mathison, a close friend of Fisher’s, who died last year. Was it out of respect for Mathison that she did not write about their relationship? “No, not at all. Melissa always felt it was not that big of a deal. But then she wasn’t the wife.”

Is she doing it for the money? Fisher laughs. “Oh, it wasn’t that much money. I had a pre-established deal, so it wasn’t like they said, ‘We’ll pay you a million dollars to tell some secret thing.’ I was just wondering if I’d have the nerve to do it.”

Rereading her diaries, Fisher says she was startled by her passion. It enabled her to write about herself in a way she never has before – not sugar-glazed with irony or wisecracks, but straight from the heart. Her daughter, Billie Lourd, read it with her for the audiobook, and “she thought it was so emotional, she had never seen me like that. No one has. This is the most personal thing I have written.”

One of the questions she repeatedly asks herself in the diaries is whether Ford has a clue how she feels. What does she think now? “I don’t think, until now, he knew the intensity of my feelings.” As for herself, she says she has probably tried to bury those emotions over the years. “Even in the diary I don’t like to admit it, because it’s a failure.” She pauses, and starts again. “No, it’s not a failure – it’s unreciprocated love.” Another pause. “Which I guess is a type of failure.”

I ask her what Ford, now married to the actor Calista Flockhart, thinks of the book. She says she doesn’t know. “I told him I was writing the book, and I would give it to him and if he didn’t like anything in it I would take it out, and he seemed surprised at that. Then I called him and said I’m going to send it to you, and I did and I never heard from him.”

She knows he is unlikely to thank her for making the story public. Ford is as taciturn as she is garrulous, as private as she is confessional. “I don’t think he wants anything known about his life,” she admits, “and he’s lived it accordingly. I certainly don’t want to say anything that would do more than embarrass him. Anything private embarrasses him.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ford and Fisher in November 1978, while making CBS TV special The Star Wars Holiday. Photograph: George Brich/AP

The affair with Ford took her by surprise. “I was shocked by the fact that he fancied me. I was a very insecure girl and had only had one boyfriend.” She writes that he whisked her off when she was tipsy, and asks herself whether he took advantage of her. What does she think now? “Oh no, never. It wasn’t that kind of thing at all.” In fact, she says, there was no way he could have known how innocent she was, because she had deliberately painted a false picture of herself. “He perceived me as this very confident, experienced girl. I don’t think he had all the information! And when he got it, he behaved accordingly, and he didn’t have to do that.”

In what way? “He softened a bit, you know, to the degree that Harrison can soften. And we stayed together for the remainder of the film. It was never going to be more than that. I didn’t think it was going to be even that.”

While Ford was the number one thing on her mind throughout filming, she reckons she was probably around 15th on his list of priorities. She often sounds desolate in the journals. “I do not want to take part in my life,” she writes. “It can just go on without me.” Was she suicidal? “No, I was never suicidal. I was just extremely insecure, especially around men.”

Yes, she says, there is a huge amount of pain there, but some of it is teenage angst and some of it was a reflection of her mental health. “I think some of that could have been being bipolar, though I hadn’t been diagnosed then. I had started going to therapy when I was 15. I realised something was a little too much with me. The doctor said, ‘Why are you here?’ and I said, ‘I want to stop crying so hard.’”

Was he as good in bed as you’d expect him to be? Fisher gasps with faux shock. 'Oh come on, I can’t answer that!'

Looking back, she says, her feeling that Ford did not really care for her couldn’t have helped. “Certainly the situation didn’t make me feel that much better about myself.” Again, she pauses. “But in a way it did.” How? “Because he’d chosen me.”

Even now, she says, her feelings about that time are mixed. “I wouldn’t want to live through that again, ever. It’s just so obsessive, and self-obsessed, and confused.” Was it one of the most intense experiences of her life? “I think so, because everything was exciting and new. We all became famous at that time, but there were other things to focus on, and certainly [the affair] was a formidable distraction. And maybe that made the fame less confusing, because it didn’t have all of my focus.”

Was he as good in bed as you’d expect Harrison Ford to be? Fisher gasps with faux shock. “Oh come on, I can’t answer that question! I was very infatuated with him. Look at him. Look at those pictures of him. Can you imagine what I thought, given what I thought of myself?” How does she feel, looking back at her teenage self now? “I felt sorry for myself, and I don’t like that at any age.” She says she’s thankful that, at 60, she is not so lacking in self-belief.

I ask if her relationship with Ford shaped future relationships. “Freakishly, yes.” How? “Well, I went with Paul after that, and Paul was not dissimilar.” Fisher dated Paul Simon for six years, was married to him for 11 months, and then dated him again after they divorced. “Paul was much more verbal. But there was something very diffident again. He was the same amount older. I was 21 and Paul was 36. They were both very cerebral and serious. And they were witty, which is different from being funny. Funny, there’s a sort of pleading in it. Witty is a much more cerebral self-expression. They both had that. And they’re both better after a couple of beers.” She says there was one crucial difference in her relationship with Simon. “This time it was reciprocal, which was a huge relief.”

What astonishes me is that Fisher says she and Ford never discussed their relationship, neither at the time nor afterwards. “He’s not a big talker,” she says drily. “You know, he wasn’t Mr Chuckles.” But what happened when they met on set for the sequels – The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi. Nothing, she says; it was just their secret. “I think it was reabsorbed. You can see in our body language that we are comfortable with each other.”

Last year they were reunited as characters for the first time in 30 years, for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Surely by then they could talk about it? “No,” she says. “On this last film I noticed that two people were flirting and they had a big age difference like we had, and I pointed it out to him, and he said [she puts on his deep-voice deadpan], ‘Well, I hope it goes well for them.’ I think it’s the only time we’ve ever referred to it.” Did he wink? “No. He’s not a wink person.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reunited for 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Photograph: Allstar/Disney/Lucasfilm

What did emerge over the years, she thinks, was a lasting friendship. Recently, she told Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker, about her affair with Ford. How did he react? “He was shocked.” Does she still love Ford? “Yes, I love him. I’ll always feel something for him. I love Mark, too, but I love Mark more like a sibling. You can’t pretend something for so long without some of it coming true.”

For a long time, Fisher had been ambivalent about the Star Wars franchise. Yes, it had made her, but it had also stultified her – for many people, she will always be Princess Leia. Now, she is simply thankful. “It has been an enormous thing in my life. And it’s been the motor that’s run everything else.”

As for her current not-so-private life, she lives with her dog, Gary Fisher (who has his own Twitter account), is single, looking to move to Britain (particularly post-Trump) and is more than ready for another man. “I want to find a British professor who will be able to put up with me, so you can put the word out. Good sense of humour, intelligent, not hideously unattractive, and sort of confident without being arrogant.”

I ask if she will be embarrassed next time she meets Ford. “Yeah, I’ll be embarrassed,” she says. How long for? “Not that long. I think it’s worth a flush or two!” She laughs.

I tell her that, as she has been talking, I’ve been picturing that scene in The Empire Strikes Back, where Princess Leia finally professes her feelings to Han Solo. “I love you,” she says. “I know,” he replies. It feels so true to life, I say. “Yes,” she says, “I think that’s definitely informed by our relationship. It is much more me to say, ‘I love you’ and much more him to say the other. He improvised his bit.”

‘A part of me felt like I’d won the man lottery’: an exclusive extract from Carrie Fisher’s new memoir

I began filming Star Wars hoping to have an affair. Hoping to strike people as sophisticated and louche, someone you’d think had gone to boarding school in Switzerland with Anjelica Huston and had learned to speak four languages.

Simon Templeman, a British boy with whom I had gone to drama school in London, had been my only boyfriend until then, and it had been a year before we slept together. That – along with some fooling around with three straight guys and kissing three gay guys – was basically the sum total of my earthling version of sexual experience.

It’s difficult to imagine a childhood less likely to make one pro-adultery than mine. My parents were known as America’s Sweethearts. The gorgeous couple with their two adorable little babies (my brother, Todd, came along 16 months after me) were the American Dream realised, until Eddie left Debbie for the gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor, recently widowed and a friend of my mother’s.

My first larger-than-life lesson was what it felt like to be on the clueless end of infidelity. So when I was contemplating having an affair on this movie, I wasn’t going to include married guys. One of the things I knew when I met Harrison Ford was that nothing of a romantic nature would happen. He was also far too old for me – almost 15 years older! On top of that, there was something intimidating about him. His face in repose looked closer to a scowl than any other expression. He looked like he didn’t care whether or not you looked at him, so you watched him not caring, hungrily. I remember thinking, “This guy’s going to be a star. Not just a celebrity, a movie star.” He looked like one of those types, like Humphrey Bogart. Some sort of epic energy hung around him, and he was so far out of my league. Compared with him, I didn’t even have a league. We were destined for different places. Was I bitter about this? Not so you’d notice.

I was in the last year of my teens, only weeks free from my drama college romance and in my first starring role. I was extremely insecure. Oh, I could be witty as the deuce, but I had no idea how I should best apply that cleverness, for I was clever, not intellectual, having dropped out of high school to be a chorus girl in my mother’s Broadway show.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘My parents were America’s Sweethearts’: Fisher with her mother, Debbie Reynolds, in 1972. Photograph: Globe Photos/Rex/Shutterstock

Harrison made me feel nervous. I got tongue-tied in his company, and clumsy. I was with him when we worked together and tried to avoid him otherwise, so as not to annoy him. It was more comfortable to hang out with the cast and crew, who were more fun and less immune to my charms.

But when I look back with squinting eyes, I figure Harrison was scoping out the set in those early days. Not to have an affair, necessarily, but not not to, either. We were on location, after all, and a quiet jaunt on the side was almost expected.

One Friday night after filming began, a party was organised to celebrate George Lucas’s 32nd birthday, in a room at Elstree Studios. Most of the crowd was made up of the crew: grips, electricians, drivers and all the others who toiled daily on the new, fairly obscure film that was being shot there.

Not having located George yet, I tried to look as blase as possible as I sauntered barward, adding a smile to the mix to make it easier for the people there to like me and not wonder why I, of all people, had been cast as the rather daunting princess.

“Hi! How you doing? Great to see you.” What were their names, I wondered of these faces I saw every day. They all knew mine: it was on the call sheet.

“Coke with ice, please? Oh, that’s right, we’re in England, there is no ice. OK, then, warm Coke it is.”

And then there was Harrison at the door. Wow, he looked thrilled to be there. It could happen, though, I thought. This could be the night he smiles. I waved as I brought my warm cola to my lips. Harrison raised his hand and began making his way through the group that was every minute growing larger – a social fungus, fed by the bar.

“Hey, look who’s here,” I greeted someone. “No, I already have a drink. It does so pass for a drink. I can’t drink. I’ve tried. I’m allergic to booze. It makes me stupid, sick and unconscious really fast.”

Two members of the crew began making sport with me. “Look who we have here, boys! It’s our little princess without her buns!” Having the only girl at the party completely off-her-ass drunk became one of the main focuses of the night – let’s get Leia legless – and if I played along, it would be the most idiotic choice I could make.

We sang Happy Birthday, after which Harrison began a conversation with George. I was once again surrounded by musty, sweat-scented, denim-clad men. They kept pushing me to have a drink, and finally the people-pleaser in me took over. I asked for an amaretto, the only thing I drank. It tastes like cough syrup, but at least it would be familiar.

I looked at the glass the crew member handed me. Instead of amaretto, it was wine. I frowned.

“Sorry,” he said, “they didn’t have your fancy drink. This should do what amaretto does, better.”

My face went into a tight-fisted grimace after my first swig of the foul stuff. And another swig, and another. I couldn’t focus on the taste for long, because there I was laughing, like those adults I watched at my mother’s parties when I was a kid.

I don’t know when I became aware that the crew were organising a kind of joke abduction of me. A jovial plan to take me to wherever movie crews take young actors when they want to establish that she belongs to them, at least for the moment. Certainly it wasn’t a serious thing. What made it look serious was how big the men tended to be.

A tug-of-war involving my wine-sodden virtue was under way, and I realised who it was I wanted to win

At some point, I realised my head was hurting.

“You need to get some air,” one of the crew said.

“Hey,” a new voice, American, not British, called out. “Where are you taking her?”

“Nowhere, man, the lady just wants a little air.”

“Pardon me, but the lady doesn’t seem to be very aware of what she wants.”

Harrison! What was he saying? I didn’t know what I wanted? When did he become the expert?

“Harrison!” I greeted him. “Where’ve you been?”

He was suddenly making a great show of saving me from what I can only guess at. The crew pulled, Harrison pushed back, I tried to stay in focus.

A tug-of-war involving my wine-sodden virtue was under way, and I was unclear how it would turn out – but I realised who it was I wanted to win: my co-star, the one with the scar on his chin, the dialogue in his head and the gun in his belt – not now, just when in character, but still. After a mad scuffle, Mr Ford threw my virtue and me into the back seat of his studio car and commanded the driver to “Go! GO!” We went, followed by the crew.

About halfway to London from Elstree, I heard the honking of a horn. I pushed Harrison’s shoulder back. “What’s that?” I asked, panicked.

“Shit,” Harrison mumbled, squinting out of the back window over my head. “It’s Mark and Peter.”

“Oh my God.” I started to sit up, but he stopped me: “Fix your hair.”

My hair – it was always my hair with this movie, on-screen or off. I stayed slunk down while I did my unlevel best to straighten my hair, then slowly rose. “Just act normal,” Harrison suggested.

A blue car caught up with us. One of the crew, Peter Kohn, was driving, with a beautiful girl, the actor Koo Stark, to his left and Mark [Hamill] in the back. He waved and smiled. I waved back.

The fact that Harrison and I had rolled around in the back seat during our return to London didn’t necessarily mean that it was a prologue for a more elaborate event. Sure, there had been some unexpected exploratory kissing. But otherwise…

Then somehow we were having dinner with Mark, Peter and Koo (whose work in Star Wars ended up on the cutting room floor) in London. Most of my thoughts centred on how much prettier Koo was than me, how confident she seemed. Harrison was on his lickety-split way to being pretty much everything to me. He would all too soon become the centre of my off-centre world.

I don’t recall much about that dinner except how self-conscious I was, how awkward and fuzzy from the alcohol. Seated at our table, I figured it would be all right to look at Harrison when and if he said something, but my hair could grow if I waited for that unlikely event, right? Wrong. He talked more than I’d ever seen him talk. There were stories about the day we’d had an early call – hardly unusual – and by early afternoon still hadn’t been summoned to the set. “It doesn’t bother me to be kept waiting,” Mark volunteered. “There are ways to keep yourself entertained.”

“Oh, yeah?” Mr Ford drawled. “What ways? Catching up on correspondence or taking up the zither?” I listened intently: everything depended on my getting into this conversation, while trying to convey that it didn’t matter to me at all.

“I would pay many hard-earned dollars to see you play the zither,” I offered shyly, hyperaware of making a good impression.

Harrison studied me briefly from across the table. Narrowing his hazel eyes, he said, “How much?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Onscreen romance in The Empire Strikes Back. Photograph: Allstar/Lucasfilm

He waited for my reply knowingly; he wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t not smiling, either. Under the table, I picked at my thumb. What were we talking about? Why was he looking at me like that?

“How much for what?” I asked them sadly. “I’m a little lost?” Now I sounded as if I was pleading.

They laughed. Harrison didn’t laugh, but he looked as though he might have if he’d been made a different way. Then I remembered. “Play the zither! I’m going to pay you to play the zither!”

“Now?” Harrison said.

“Yes!”

We all laughed. Maybe everything would be all right now. I was going to go home with Harrison. I knew it wasn’t a good idea. It would never be a good idea, but it wouldn’t be a really bad one either. I mean, weird and grumpy as he might have been, he wasn’t a bad human.

We stood under the timid light of a street lamp outside the restaurant. Harrison flicked away his Camel and looked at me: “I can drop you at your place – it’s on my way.” He took my arm and drew me into the back of a taxi, moving us closer and closer until we were two faces, four eyes, one kiss, going to the place where we could rehearse that kissing we would be doing a year and a half later in The Empire Strikes Back. These were the early days and nights of the Force.

It’s difficult to recall details from that weekend. Even if I could, what are we talking about here, soft porn for hardened sci-fi fans? All I can remember, after he followed me in and turned on the hallway light, was that I meant to show him around my little flat, only now our fumbling was not in a moving vehicle, driven by a knowing spectator.

A tiny part of me felt like I’d won the man lottery and here I was both counting and spending the money. I looked over at Harrison. He was… God, he was just so handsome. No, more than that. He looked like he could lead the charge into battle, take the hill, win the duel, be leader of the gluten-free world, all without breaking a sweat. So how could you ask such a shining specimen of a man to be satisfied with the likes of me? No! Don’t tell me! The fact is that he was! Even if it was for a short while. That was way more than enough.

Harrison fell asleep and I tried to. I forgave him for not loving me in the way one expects – and almost forgave myself for not expecting it. I breathed with him there in the dark – wondering what he was dreaming and hoping I would wake up before he did. Maybe I’d be better at talking with him now – less daunted, in character and out.

I wasn’t good at being clear about anything that I wanted with Harrison. I could charm the birds out of everyone’s trees but his. Instead, I wrote in the diaries I kept during filming. There were two reasons I wrote them: I’d always written, since I was 12; and I couldn’t talk to Harrison. Basically about anything, but especially about the entity that was “us”. And given my time with him was a secret, I couldn’t confide in anyone else.

There are some things I still consider private. Amazing, isn’t it? But sex is private. So I put the kibosh on sharing what occurred between Mr Ford and me on that fateful Friday night in May 1976, and on subsequent Fridays at ungodly hours.

I didn’t know how I would live through the five whole days of filming following that first weekend. Those five days went unbearably slowly, with our having to behave towards each other as though the weekend before hadn’t even occurred.

All through the week, I waited in vain for some indication that (a) we had ever been together (or had I imagined the entire event?) and/or (b) if it had occurred, would it ever occur again in any form, ranging from another inarticulate weekend to finally marrying (after a discreet amount of time had elapsed since his eventual, uncomplicated divorce). I’m sure on our relative lists of priorities, I might have ranked as high as number 15 on his agenda, while Harrison was my number one.

I’d made him laugh. Almost 40 years later, I still think of it as one of the greater moments of my life

But spend a second weekend we did. Once again, we were together in our apart way. We met at the North Star pub in St John’s Wood, between Elstree and central London. I held my breath quite a bit – a lot – while fretting over what I would and would not say that evening. I would be calm and succinct, ask thoughtful questions and listen to his answers. He would wonder where I had been all his life.

In fact, what happened was Harrison and I both began to drink and at some point early on I said, “Do you want to see me do an imitation of you?”

Harrison didn’t walk, he swaggered, like John Wayne in slow motion – taking his seemingly bad attitude for a walk. To depict this, I moved out of sight and after a moment reappeared, strolling as he strolled, sauntering my way into whatever fresh hell I found myself. I’d become him, disenchanted Lord Ford, master of all he surveyed.

I hadn’t looked at Harrison yet to see how my portrayal of him was going over – too busy appearing indifferent and impatient with my surroundings. As I continued to portray his inner monologue, I finally let at least one of my eyes slide wearily to his face and saw that he was not only laughing, he was laughing that silent and hard laugh reserved for true enthusiasm. Almost 40 years later, I still think of it as one of the greater moments of my life.

If my portrait of my co-star as a smug, scruffy-looking nerf herder went well enough, Harrison could unexpectedly (but gently and responsibly) leave his wife and marry me (in an unsentimental, tasteful way), and we would subsequently astonish everyone – including ourselves – by remaining together for the rest of whoever died first’s life. And all because I dared to do an imitation of him, for him, in the pub one night! That was the beginning of his realising that I was the only person with whom he felt comfortable enough to be, well, still uncomfortable, but now at peace with finding the world a constant disappointment.

This was the first time I felt as though Harrison liked me. Not because he wanted to sleep with me, or no one else was around. He liked me. I’d made him laugh. We sat smiling at each other, each waiting for the other to – what? Say something!

“I do other imitations,” I finally offered. “Judy Garland for one, but you wouldn’t like it – it’s pretty loud and includes dancing and a lot of makeup.”

He nodded. “Any more quiet ones? Like mine?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I remember thinking, this guy’s going to be a star’: Fisher with Ford and Mark Hamill in June 1977. Photograph: Steve Larson/The Denver Post via Getty Images

I thought for a moment, searching for a funny reply. What to say? Oh, please make him like me! Then everything will be fine, or thereabouts. But no punchlines came to deliver that body blow that would reignite the blaze of his smile. He hates me now, and thinks I’m boring and stupid.

“I could do an imitation of my college boyfriend. He was super-quiet.”

Harrison raised his eyebrows slightly. “Oh?”

“Yeah, well, maybe all boyfriends are quiet.” Not boyfriends! Harrison wasn’t my boyfriend and would never be. Fix this!

“Well, I wouldn’t know about all boyfriends,” I rattled on. “Simon’s the first boyfriend I ever had. And I don’t really – I’m not actually looking to…”

Harrison’s face had whitened suddenly. “What do you mean, your only boyfriend?”

I blinked. What had I done now? I struggled for something to say.

“What about all those guys you talked about?” he said. “Rob, the photographer, and Fred and Buck…”

Still frowning, I said, “Fred? I didn’t sleep with him, I know him. Hey, you know him, too! Does that mean you slept with him? I don’t sleep with all the men I know. Christ, if you thought that I slept with every man who found himself in some story of mine, you must think I’m like a hooker or something! A slut! So I guess that made it all right for you!”

“Made what all right?”

“To fuck hookers! Your big, slutty co-star… Me!”

He interrupted, “All right! Enough!”

“Fine,” I said, sulking, “but you shut up also.”

(A version of that happened. A toned-down version, with fewer words and a lot less volume.)

Harrison was looking at the floor, blinking. Why was he so upset? I thought men liked it if you were inexperienced. Or was that only in Victorian times?

It didn’t occur to me until decades later that perhaps what disturbed him was the implication that he was subsequently burdened with something very like responsibility, in that he had somehow been given a gift he hadn’t wanted or expected.

How can I paint for you the picture of this brief break in the bad weather of no feeling? Sadly, I cannot because of the memory loss that comes with marijuana use. The three-month ingestion of Harrison’s preferred strain of pot took whatever certainty I possessed while in his company and traded it for paranoia so intense, it took my breath away. What I recall from the rubble of my brain cells is my discomfort between waking and sleeping, trying to think of something to say other than, “Do you love me?” or, “Why are you with me?” Though there has been speculation regarding my drug use during Star Wars, I used nothing other than Harrison’s pot on the weekends during that first film, and have never used marijuana again.

Harrison finished shooting first. My last scenes would be two weeks later, so I decided to go back to LA for a break, and we wound up flying there together. I don’t know if he was pleased with these arrangements, because he didn’t exhibit emotions and I didn’t record it in my journals, but we did wind up talking. I do remember that he was kind. Kind enough to enable me to close the door on our three-month episode together without regret. Which was quite a turn of events, when you consider all those silent weekends.

“I’m a hick,” I recall saying to him.

“No,” he answered. “You think you’re less than you are. You’re a smart hick.” And then, “You have the eyes of a doe and the balls of a samurai.”

It’s the only thing he ever said to me that acknowledged any intimacy between us, and it was enough. Not only because it had to be, but because of what I’m assuming it cost him to go that out of character in conversation. We never again acknowledged that anything of that nature had occurred.

• This is an edited extract from The Princess Diarist, by Carrie Fisher, published next week by Transworld priced £16.99. To order a copy for £13.93, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.