SEX toys are an unusual sort of Christmas gift for a mother to give a 15-year-old girl.

But then Carrie Fisher – better known to billions around the globe as Princess Leia in Star Wars – grew up in a rather extraordinary family.

Fisher recalls that her mother – Debbie Reynolds of Singin' in the Rain fame – had started dating a bloke named Bob Fallon, whom she and her brother promptly dubbed Bob Phallus because he brought with him a range of sex toys and aphrodisiacs.

"Well actually Anglo-disiacs because we're white," she adds.

Anyway, that Christmas both she and her grandmother received vibrators, although her grandmother refused to use hers because she was scared it would short circuit her pacemaker.

It was hardly a conventional upbringing, and Wishful Drinking is far from a conventional autobiographical work.

The book is not so much Fisher's memoirs as a stream of consciousness that she wrote recently after three weeks of electroconvulsive (shock) therapy treatment for chronic depression.

Fisher is a drug addict and alcoholic and a poster woman for people with bipolar disorder (manic depression).

Again, Fisher's own words are best here:

"So having waited all my life to get an award for something, anything (OK, fine, not acting, but what about a tiny little award for writing? Nope) I now get awards all the time for being mentally ill. I'm apparently very good at it and am honoured for it regularly."

And on drugs: "You know how they say religion is the opiate of the masses? Well I took masses of opiates religiously."

Her recollections of childhood as the daughter of famous persons sounds positively surreal. Her father ran off with Elizabeth Taylor when she was about three, and her mother it appears didn't spend the rest of her life as a shrinking violet when it came to romance.

Or as Fisher puts it at one point: "I don't like to miss any of my parents' weddings."

Still, Carrie Fisher will always be remembered as the young princess with an idiotic hairstyle, a pair of robotic companions and who was quite handy with a blaster when needed. Oh, and who didn't wear a bra.

She recalls how George Lucas came up to her on the first day of filming Star Wars and "he takes one look at the dress and says 'You can't wear a bra under that dress.'

"So, I say, 'OK, I'll bite. Why?'

And he says, 'Because . . . there's no underwear in space'."

Wishful Drinking is rich in anecdote and personality, and positively redolent with Fisher's uniquely sardonic and self-deprecating sense of humour.

It truly is a captivating read – at times laugh-out-loud and quote-the-lines-to-your-friends funny, at times slightly reflective, but entertaining from start to finish.

Highly recommended.

Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher, (Simon & Schuster, $29.95).

Originally published as Carrie Fisher lets it all out