From real-life Hollywood princess to Princess Leia, Carrie Fisher has lived a life beyond colorful. Daughter of a tabloid-rocked show business marriage, co-star of one of the world’s most beloved blockbuster films at age 19, married and divorced from a pop music icon, and in and out of rehab numerous times; Fisher has survived with odds-defying resilience and no small measure of sharp wit.

Actress, screenwriter, and best-selling novelist, Fisher has long mined the absurdities of her life in her work, but with her SRO one-woman show, Wishful Drinking, she has finally told the unvarnished truth and captivated audiences across the country in the process. Adapted from that “hilariously ennobling” (Los Angeles Times) and “exceedingly clever” (Wall Street Journal) stage show, WISHFUL DRINKING (Simon & Schuster) is a caustic memoir of Fisher’s wild first half-century—a blunt testament of mid-life self-discovery, and a frank account of coming to terms with bi-polar disorder and addiction.

“I am truly a product of Hollywood,” Fisher writes. “I’m a product of Hollywood inbreeding. When two celebrities mate, something like me is the result. I grew up visiting sets, playing on backlots, and watching movies. In consequence, and for a few other reasons, I find that I don’t have a conventional sense of reality. (Not that I’ve ever had much use for reality—having spent much of what I laughingly refer to as my adult life attempting to wave it away with drug use.)”

Those celebrities were, of course, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, two of America’s sweethearts joined in a storybook marriage—until Eddie ran off with Debbie’s recently widowed best friend, Elizabeth Taylor. Young Carrie’s relationships with her famous parents couldn’t help but shape her destiny, and WISHFUL DRINKING is filled with anecdotes of growing up as the daughter of a glamorous movie star mother with a somewhat unconventional take on life and a sexual rogue of a father whom she rarely saw. Fisher is forthright about her own failed marriages—the first to her soul mate, the brilliant singer songwriter Paul Simon (Mike Nichols called them “two flowers, no gardener”), the second to talent agent Bryan Lourd who, a year after their daughter was born, left Carrie for a man (mother Debbie: “You know dear, we’ve had every sort of man in our family—we’ve had horse thieves, and alcoholics, and one-man bands—but this is our first homosexual.”)

Fisher takes no prisoners when sharing her rueful memories of working with George Lucas, Harrison Ford, and Mark Hamill on Star Wars, dealing with that ridiculous coif and seeing her likeness marketed as, among other things, a PEZ dispenser. Other bits of show biz nostalgia: Working in the chorus line of her mother’s Broadway show as a teenager (“I don’t care what you’ve heard, chorus work is far more valuable to a child than any education could ever be”), when her younger brother, Todd, shot himself in the leg with a blank (“We were suddenly more like a mafia family than a show business one!”). Cary Grant calling at her mother’s behest after being told Carrie was addicted to LSD (“as if such a thing were possible”). And then there was the time Bob Dylan, whom she’d never met, called her from the road to discuss a name for his cologne.

Fisher’s realization that she is an alcoholic and her on and off periods of sobriety and relapse provide a tender through-line in WISHFUL DRINKING, as she comes face to face with her addictions and the reality of her bi-polar disorder, with its incredible, energetic highs and its depths-of-depression lows. It’s not without its compensations: “Having waited my entire life to get an award for something, anything (okay fine, not acting, but what about a tiny award for writing? Nope), I now get awards all the time for being mentally ill. I’m apparently very good at it and am honored for it regularly….[I]t’s better than being bad at being insane, right? How tragic would it be to be runner-up for Bipolar Woman of the Year?”

With the same self-deprecating, bull’s-eye humor that has infused such best-selling novels as Surrender the Pink and Postcards from Edge (as well as the film for which she wrote the screenplay starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine), Carrie Fisher now tells the most vital story of her career—her own—“as honestly, sardonically, fetchingly, caustically, and comically as she can” (San Francisco Chronicle). WISHFUL DRINKING is a singular memoir from one of show business’s most singular minds.