New York -- Maybe it has to do with Carrie Fisher's not-so-repressed wish to have a session with her psychoanalyst, or maybe it's because after four days of talking to reporters she's just plain tired. Whatever the reason, Carrie Fisher is conducting an interview from a semi-reclining position in her suite at the posh St. Regis Hotel.
"The other day I got on the elevator here and I pushed 16 because that's the floor my shrink is on," says Ms. Fisher, visibly amused at the sly way her unconscious expressed itself. "I was ready to go to the shrink . . . where you can just say anything awful, stupid and random."
It's hard to imagine this witty, sharp and very smart 38-year-old woman -- who's invaded Manhattan to promote her third novel, "Delusions of Grandma" -- ever saying anything stupid. As for awful, well, awful is in the eye of the beholder. True, Ms. Fisher takes no prisoners when she talks, but one senses it's the truth she's after, not the shock value.
Which brings us to random.
It would be wrong to say Carrie Fisher speaks in a random fashion. Let's face it: Carrie Fisher is way beyond random. Indeed, her entire approach to conversation appears to be based on the James Joyce-Sigmund Freud Stream of Consciousness Method. There are few points-of-reference in her conversations. And no transitions. You either catch the wave and ride it, or you don't.
She writes that way, too, says Simon & Schuster editor Becky Saletan, who worked with her on "Delusions." "Carrie is not a linear person. But that's true of any good fiction writer," she says.
Not only is Ms. Fisher not linear, she also keeps forgetting to promote the book -- which, like her other two novels, "Postcards from the Edge" and "Surrender the Pink" -- is based largely on her own life. Instead, she keeps returning to the past -- moving back and forth between The Scandal, as she calls it, of her childhood and The Scandal that is dogging her now. Listening to Ms. Fisher, one supposes, is like being an analyst listening to a patient.
Take, for instance, the following soliloquy concerning an important passage in her childhood:
I remember being a baby in the first house we grew up in, and I remember standing in the doorway of my bedroom, and I remember looking at my mother and she was alone in a really big bed. And I remember clocking that. And I remember my father took me to meet Elizabeth Taylor. I couldn't have been more than 3. I remember her opening the door at the Beverly Hills Hotel and she was in a nightgown. And she was beautiful. And I remember I had to notice who that was. Because something bad had happened. Something that people didn't talk about . . .
