“George Lucas ruined my life,” Ms. Fisher says, which doesn’t seem entirely fair. On the other hand, in a book full of weirdos, he emerges as possibly the strangest of all. He wouldn’t let Ms. Fisher wear a bra under her Princess Leia shift because, as he patiently explained to her, there is no underwear in space: according to Lucas-physics, if you were to wear a bra in a weightless environment, your bra would strangle you.

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What her Hollywood upbringing doesn’t account for is Ms. Fisher’s manifest intelligence and adroit way with words. She is one of the rare inhabitants of La-La land who can actually write and has published four novels, the best of which, the semi-autobiographical “Postcards From the Edge,” became a prize-winning movie with a script by Ms. Fisher herself.

“Wishful Drinking,” however, grew out of a one-woman standup act, and it shows. The book is pretty slight, padded out with big type, extra space between the lines and some family photographs, and it displays at times an almost antic need to entertain. The paragraphs are short, and the jokes — the puns, the wisecracks, the deadpan one-liners — come rattling along at the rate of one every other sentence or so.

It’s not entirely clear whose attention span is being catered to here: the reader’s or Ms. Fisher’s. At the beginning of the book she explains that she has undergone electroconvulsive shock therapy, which has erased some of her memory, and one of the organizing conceits of “Wishful Drinking” is that she is trying to get reacquainted with herself.

Here, she writes, is what the message on her answering machine says: “Hello and welcome to Carrie’s voice mail. Due to recent electroconvulsive therapy, please pay close attention to the following options. Leave your name, number and a brief history as to how Carrie knows you, and she’ll get back to you if this jogs her memory.” She’s kidding, but a more serious anxiety — a wish to assert that she’s still here, still smart, still funny — may explain the book’s glitter-eyed, Ancient Mariner quality, the way it buttonholes you and, desperate to please, wrings laughs from the story of Ms. Fisher’s strange, off-the-wall journey.

She won’t let you feel sorry for her, which is greatly to her credit in this age of needy, tell-all celebrity memoirs, but neither can she relax or stop joking. She writes: “If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.” But her book is sometimes like a smile so forced it must hurt.