Shockaholic
Author: Carrie Fisher
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 176 pages

To a particular generation, Carrie Fisher is Princess Leia Organa, the starring role she played in the original Star Wars trilogy.

So it is no surprise that Fisher references that life-changing, iconic role in her latest memoir, Shockaholic.

The book's cover, as you can see, humorously features a Princess Leia doll holding its head.

While Fisher's 2008 memoir, Wishful Drinking, tackled her struggle with fame, addiction, depression, brushes with mental illness, and tales about her one-time stepmother Elizabeth Taylor, Shockaholic offers more insights into Fisher's life as part of Hollywood royalty, including titbits about her parents' - Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher - marriage and its eventual breakdown because of Taylor, and Fisher's fraught relationship with her father.

In short, Fisher pierces through the Hollywood facade and gloss and zeroes in on all the issues that mean a lot to her, making this a very personal memoir indeed.

To her credit, Fisher tackles all her issues with her trademark sardonic humour that brought not only smirks and smiles to this reviewer but also full-on laughter.

The years between Wishful Drinking and Shockaholic (which was published late last year) have not been all that kind to Fisher.

She lost her father Eddie in 2009 while she was on tour with her one-woman show, Wishful Drinking, and Taylor in 2011.

In between, to battle the demons that reside inside her head, Fisher underwent electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which she says is helping to cure her depression.

But one of the treatment's side effects is memory loss.

So, as an introduction, Fisher states that Shockaholic was conceived as a way to preserve a part of her life while she can still remember who she is.

"So before I fail to remember anything else that could result in any future social embarrassment, I thought I would jot down a few things that I might one day enjoy reflecting on.

Or, if the ECT continues to take its toll, reading some of the things I've jotted as if for the very first time. What follows is a sort of an anecdotal memoir of a potentially more than partial amnesiac."

It's a good idea because Fisher certainly has a lot to remember - growing up in Hollywood meant that her childhood was anything but conventional and far from stable.

The dysfunction began when her father Eddie Fisher famously left his family to comfort Elizabeth Taylor following the death of Taylor's third husband, Mike Todd.

Debbie Reynolds' subsequent marriages meant Carrie and her brother Todd had two stepfathers who were not very involved in their lives (and were even distant with Reynolds herself); one of them even turned out to be a cheat, swindling all of Reynolds' earnings.

This meant Todd and Carrie had to help their mother out by following her on tour to ensure they had a house to come home to and food on the table.

Despite the obvious difficulty and disruption, Fisher is very matter-of-fact when describing those lean years.

It is amusing to read that even Hollywood stars can hold grudges against their parents and step-parents.

Following Eddie's marriage to Taylor, Fisher developed a "love-hate-indifferent" relationship with her father and always had a wary and distant relationship with Taylor, which was difficult as "Hollywood can be a small village and, more often than not, encourages inbreeding."

(In Wishful Drinking, Fisher writes that her daughter Billie Lourd had a more than fleeting interest in one of Taylor's grandsons, an event that both amused and horrified Fisher.)

Underlining the point that Hollywood stars are "ordinary folk", Fisher writes that after 30-odd years of viewing Taylor as the wicked stepmother who destroyed any stability her parents could have afforded her, she finally made her peace with the Hollywood legend by daring Taylor to push her into the pool.

While Shockaholic is littered with talk of celebrities and Hollywood gossip, the anchor of the memoir is Fisher's father, Eddie.

Fisher is open enough to commit to history her father's unorthodox method of parenting - Eddie used to supply Fisher with narcotics, and father and daughter used to get high together - as well as his various shenanigans with women after Taylor divorced him (to marry Richard Burton).

Though it was her father who supplied the drugs, Fisher does not blame him, or indeed anyone else, for her addiction.

In fact, neither in Wishful Drinking nor in this book does she even try to explain why she became a junkie. It is one of the many events in her life that she has no explanation for, she says.

While Fisher leans towards being sardonic about personal events and the people in her life, Shockaholic has an air of poignancy as she segues into her rollercoaster relationship with her father.

During his dying years when she "parented" Eddie, Fisher discovered that giving her father what she wished he had given her led to a wonderfully blessed reunion.

She bluntly states: "To parent my parent was the pathway to my relationship with Eddie Fisher, my old Pa-pa.

Enough of a relationship to where I miss him now (he died, aged 82, in 2010).

"And I miss him in a very different way than how I missed him throughout my childhood. Then I missed the idea of him. Now I miss the man - my dad."

While Shockaholic is witty and humorous as well as being an easy read, Fisher does seem to lose her way at times when describing one event and meandering onto a different topic altogether before getting back on track to her original point.

Rambling aside, though, Shockaholic is an interesting read and a refreshing take on the usual self-serving Hollywood memoir.

There is no gloss, just very telling events, described starkly.

Fisher does not ask for sympathy from her readers; she merely recounts the peaks and valleys in her life as fact.

For this alone, it is worth a peek into Shockaholic and the mind that portrayed Princess Leia Organa.