Technically, this is the first book that I had finished reading this year. I have been going through a difficult time and I had this idea sprout in my head—sometime when I was reading all of those John Waters books, that I need Role Models….so naturally I went first to John Waters and then to Princess Leia.

Not because of Princess Leia, of course. While I was once a pedantic Star Wars nerd, I mentally separate the actors from the franchise. Carrie Fisher isn’t Princess Leia, she’s a punch up writer. This is much, much cooler to me. She’s someone you send a script to when you know it’s close but it ain’t gonna make it—or did, past tense, now that she’s passed on. It’s in Wishful Drinking that she shares the story about George Lucas’s intuitive costume decisions and wanting her obituary to read: drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra.

My reasoning is that Carrie Fisher survived divorce and bipolar disorder and drug additions, and did so with a well known flare for humor, charm, and ‘fuck it’. I could use that sort of role model. I think anybody could.

The book is a quick 164 pages with a lot of photographs and anecdotes—this is where I noticed the trend in the memoirs I was reading. Folks stack in as many pictures as they can. Carl Reiner, whose I Just Remembered I also read early this year had a glut of photographs. It’s something both cool, reaching into history, and that I want to make fun of it. How many memoirs were you people going to write, you couldn’t cram it into one, you had to fluff it so you could get in a few sequels?

I say that lovingly.

Carl Reiner is another good role model for me. The man seemed aggressively optimistic.

But I think that’s what memoirs are best for, rooting through and finding the humanity in people and grabbing onto those traits you admire—and getting a strangle hold on them.