After troubled times,Fisher buoyed by wit,friendships

A discreetly positioned placard should warn anyon approaching the vicinity of Carrie Fisher: "Caution:Words at Play."

She says: "I want to have values, instead of just being valuable."

And: "I seem to take the right things in the wrong way."

And: "It's not what you're given, it's how you take it."

Ms. Fisher, as evidenced in her novels "Postcards from the Edge" and the new "Surrender the Pink," as well as her screenplay for the movie "Postcards from the Edge," which opens today, has a thing about verbal acuity.

She hones her prowess in the company she keeps. Ms. Fisher's friends read like a hip Intelligentsia Invitational Open: David Mamet, Meg Wolitzer, J.D. Souther, Penny Marshall, Don Henley, Dawn Steel, Meryl Streep -- all being people who, at the very least, think they're smart.

"I want to be a good writer, but I want more to be a better friend," she says. "I want to keep up with a well-kept group."

Her intellectual ferocity, and her friendships, are an emphatic note in the life of Ms. Fisher, a woman better known in other lights. Her father, Eddie Fisher, did leave her mother, Debbie Reynolds, for Elizabeth Taylor in '58. She did marry, then divorce, Paul Simon. She was Princess Leia in "Star Wars." And she did undergo rehabilitation for a nasty drug habit.

The perception of Ms. Fisher as a daughter of darkness can easily be sustained through a viewing of "Postcards," a movie markedly different from the book in that it concentrates on the mother/daughter relationship. In the Debbie Reynolds role is Shirley MacLaine, overbearing, intrusive and possibly alcoholic. In the Carrie Fisher role is Meryl Streep, lost on the way to being found.

Ms. Fisher says the movie script is less balanced than her book. "I feel the argument weighed heavier against the mother in the movie, through the performances, and the editing, which I don't think is fair, given that I have ... a very public mother," says Ms. Fisher. "She's going to have to answer to that and I feel enormously guilty.

"My mother is so fantastic that she can sit and watch that movie and say: 'Honey, give yourself a break, or let me give to you the one that you can't. Do not feel bad about this. I don't. It's a great movie.' I don't need a better mother than that. That's the one I need."