The Best Awful

I have read all four of Carrie Fisher's novels, and this one is my second favorite, after the charming, hilarious "Delusions of Grandma." This novel includes many colorful central and secondary characters, but none as vibrant as Suzanne Vale, the bipolar heroine. "The Best Awful" takes the reader on a roller-coster ride from the stability of everyday "sane" life through the perils of meltdown...and all the way to the loony bin and out again. Laced with Fisher's winning humor and alarming literacy, this novel is a winner from beginning to end. The ride will keep you laughing and leave you a little sad, but ultimately "The Best Awful" serves as a satifying read.

If you think Carrie Fisher is just an actress turned writer, The Best Awful will convince you she's quite a marvelous novelist. I can't remember a book with a more harrowing and hilarious depiction of the inside of a bipolar mind, and leavened as it is with comic gunfire and celebrity mayhem, it's more affecting in the end than "Girl, Interrupted."

Arthur Miller, the playwright, once said something along the lines of, "Agony, sure I have agony. But everybody has agony. The difference is that I take mine home and try to make it sing."From Carrie Fisher, we get an aria, and quite a successful one at that. I was expecting to be entertained by The Best Awful, and I was, yet the novel is far more satisfying than Hollywood fluff. Whatever insights the author has earned through her turbulent/famous/funny life have given her depth and substance as an author. Fisher offers up sharp dialogue (not just a string of one-liners), a vivid but unpreachy view of mental health and its absence, and characters so real that I expected to see them sitting next to me on the sofa.Wow.

Postcards From The Edge defined its time, and now after an elegant absence Ms. Fisher once more sets pen to page to amuse the rest of us mortals. Tackling the subject of manic depression is something only teh very brave and the very eloquent would assume; luckily for readers, she is both. I believe history bears this out...and The Best Awful is a great read, as well as a wonderful quasi-rebuttal to her father's conceit of a "biography" whose name hardly bears mentioning. Eddie Fisher. Proof that there is a Goddess, and that she has smiled again upon those of us who sprang from less-than-ideal loins (although i adore and respect Debbie Reynolds - a great talent and a survivor) and survived drugs, alcohol and other various maladies to triumph. Well done, Ms. Fisher. You rock.