Naomi Fry’s Favorite Book

Being asked to name my favorite book of all time feels like way too much pressure (apologies to the asker, this newsletter’s editor). The older I get, the harder I find it to make definitive calls of this sort, since, by this point in my life, God bless, I’ve read a whole bunch of books, and have hated but also loved too many to recall. And so, any answer I’d give would be provisional, or incomplete, or mood dependent. That said, there is one book that I’ll never not be in the frame of mind to read, and maybe that’s one definition of “favorite,” so here goes.

I first encountered Carrie Fisher’s “Postcards from the Edge” when I was fourteen, in 1990. The mass-market paperback that I picked up at University Book Store, in Seattle, which is the edition I still have, was published as a tie-in with the Mike Nichols adaptation that had just been released in theatres. The movie, which stars Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep, is also fantastic, and if you haven’t seen it you absolutely should—MacLaine’s performance, especially, is what comes to my mind when I think of the words “great acting”—but the book it was based on is the work that truly has my heart.

Though ostensibly a novel—about an actress named Suzanne Vale, who overdoses on pills, goes to rehab, and must then rebuild her career and relationships in her weird, disheartening, and exhilarating home town of Hollywood—“Postcards” is, in fact, a thinly veiled account of Fisher’s life, and it met me at exactly the right time in my own. I was a teen-age girl trying to find out what it meant to become a woman, and Fisher gave me the answers: you could be fucked up and depressed and self-loathing and still be smart and funny; you could struggle and then triumph and then struggle and then triumph; you could cry and you could laugh, often simultaneously. None of this was easy, but some of it, at least, was hilarious. Reading the book gave me hope, and, more than thirty years later, it still does.