The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club for the month of January 2017.

I'm Katie Waldman, a staff writer here at Slate, and I'm joined today by Laura Bennett, Slate's culture editor.

Hey, Laura.

Hi, Katie.

And making her audio book club debut, Slate's culture editor. Hey, Laura. Hi, Kitty. And making her audio book club debut, Slate staff writer and host of the podcast represent, Aisha Harris. Hey, Aisha. Hey, I totally, I just realized

that I've never been on the audio book club before. I know. I'm so excited. I realize that

either. I never really read books, so that's part of the reason why.

Welcome.

But I'm happy to be here.

So you guys are here because we've convened this emergency audiobook club to address the sad news that Carrie Fisher, the beloved actress and writer, has died.

We were going to discuss Bob Dylan, but he is

fortunately still with us. So we thought that instead we would tip our hats to Fisher and honor

her literary legacy. So we're going to talk about her novel postcards from The Edge.

And I think it's accurate to call it a novel, right? Like it's thinly veiled autobiography maybe, or maybe it came more purely out of her imagination.

And I guess we can get there.

She pretty emphatically called it a novel.

She's kind of rejected the label memoir.

Debbie Reynolds definitely rejected the label memoir.

It was a kind of, you know, lately, it was definitely a fictionalized account of her own life and her own emotional landscape, but definitely a novel. All right. So novel, the case closed. I retract that level of ambiguity. Anyway, she published it in 1987. Three years later, it was made into a great movie starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLean.

And I think Fisher was the one to write the script and to adapt it.

I had never read this book before.

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