I really enjoyed the Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher. I was surprised at how much poetry was included in her diaries. 

It was interesting reading so much about Harrison Ford and their relationship. It did not go much into Star Wars, as I assumed.

If you love Carrie Fisher and her other books, I think you will really enjoy this. 

We had out book club meeting and I wish I listened to the audiobook. She reads it and Billie Lourd reads her excerpts from the diary.

I laughed, and I grimaced, and I ran a gamut of other emotions, from surprise, to disbelief, to pain and sympathy.

I started to follow a print while listening because at first I did not always catch what Fisher was saying. There was much pausing, and after a while I kept doing it because there are minute differences here and there.

This is a very interesting lady. What astounded me the most is her capacity to write her 19-year-old self, with all the embarrassment and self-doubt. It's powerful enough to make you uncomfortable by proxy.

Back then I was always looking ahead to who I wanted to be versus who I didn’t realize I already was, and the wished-for me was most likely based on who other people seemed to be and the desire to have the same effect on others that they had had on me.

She writes an almost nude picture of herself, the good, the bad, the WTF (and there were many, many instances where I went WTF), the petty, the shy, the self-aware, the painfully young. There is this sense of "I'm at the last part of the slide, and I have little fucks left to give" mixed with the "still want to be liked".

There is a lot about her relationship with the character, a lot mixed feelings that in the end, amount to mostly positive.

“You were my first crush.” I heard it so much I started asking who their second one was. We know what a first crush is to a teenager, but what does it mean to a five-year-old?
“But I thought you were mine! That I had found you—I was the only one who knew how beautiful you were—because you weren’t beautiful in that usual way women in film are, right?”
He realizes that I might take what he’s saying wrong. He doesn’t mean it that way. I reassure him, touch his arm; why not give him an anecdote? “I know what you mean, it’s fine. Go on.”
He checks my face to see if I mean it. I do. He continues, “So my friend, when I tell him about my crush, he goes, ‘Oh yeah, she’s awesome! I have a total crush on her, too. Everyone does.’ I got upset. I coulda punched him.”
“Why?”
“Because you were mine and I wanted to be the one who loved you. Me, maybe even help you . . .” He got embarrassed. “Anyway—I wanted to tell you.” He shrugs, then adds, “Thanks for my childhood,” and walks off. Wow, what a thing to be given credit for, to be thanked for! Because he didn’t mean his whole childhood—he meant the good bits. The parts he escaped to.

It was a weird and nostalgic ride.

If you can find a common language that runs from five to eighty-five, you’ve got yourself something, and Star Wars fans have something.

When Carrie Fisher recently discovered the journals she kept during the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she was astonished to see what they had preserved—plaintive love poems, unbridled musings with youthful naiveté, and a vulnerability that she barely recognized. Today, her fame as an author, actress, and pop-culture icon is indisputable, but in 1977, Carrie Fisher was just a teenager with an all-consuming crush on her costar, Harrison Ford. 

With these excerpts from her handwritten notebooks, The Princess Diarist is Fisher’s intimate and revealing recollection of what happened on one of the most famous film sets of all time—and what developed behind the scenes. Fisher also ponders the joys and insanity of celebrity, and the absurdity of a life spawned by Hollywood royalty, only to be surpassed by her own outer-space royalty. Laugh-out-loud hilarious and endlessly quotable, The Princess Diarist brims with the candor and introspection of a diary while offering shrewd insight into the type of stardom that few will ever experience.

When I started this book, I found it to be totally compulsive listening. Carrie Fisher looking back on her involvement with Star Wars forty years later and including journal entries made at the time of the first movie - how could I resist that? WHY would I resist that?

I listened happily enough to the first half of the book, dipping in for about thirty minutes at a time, long enough for Carrie Fisher to share an anecdote or two. Her self-deprecating humour, her disarming honesty, her look-we-both-know-I-don't-really-mean-ALL-of-this storytelling style created an atmosphere of casual intimacy and delivered a few laughs and a few so-that's-how-it-was moments. 

The more I listened, the more I understood how hard it is, forty years later, to recall your nineteen-year-old self with any accuracy. Add in being high on strong pot, apparently supplied by Harrison Ford, for most of the interesting bits and what you get is: I was nineteen. I wanted people to like me. I wanted HIM to like me. I did stupid stuff. I was nineteen. I wanted people to... and so on, delivered with gusto and amusement but with more style than content.

The second half of the book is where I faltered. These are Carrie Fisher's journal entries, written when she was filming the first Star Wars movie.

Carrie Fisher has already explained that her journal was a form of therapy that provided her with a space to talk about all the things she couldn't share with other people. 

It's a collection of thoughts, rants, poems and self-flagellating rebukes of her own behaviour. In other words, it's all you might expect of a literate, imaginative, angst-ridden nineteen-year-old trying to find her identity.

As a historical source document, many will find it invaluable. As a book to listen to, I found it too over-written and too truthful to be a comfortable read. I started to feel like a voyeur. 

Carrie Fisher as a grown woman, measuring her prose for publication, inviting me to like her and sharing stories she's happy to repeat was something I enjoyed.

Carrie Fisher at nineteen, sharing her emotional highs and lows with her journal was too raw for me, so I put the book aside.

Carrie Fisher reading her own diary looking back on her involvement with Star Wars and including journal entries made at the time of the first movie - how could I resist that? WHY would I resist that.

With dry wit, unflinching candour, a dash of carefully expressed malice and a wry sense of humour, Carrie Fisher takes us into her confidence. I'm going to be dipping into this eagerly when I need to relax.