From KCRW in Santa Monica, I'm Claude Brodessa Ackner, and this is the best of the business.

So you still want to do the show business, and you think that you got what it takes.

I mean, you really got a rap and be all at.

Let's prepare yourself for the brakes. Check it out.

This week on the business, as Princess Leia, she was saved from the Empire by Luke, Han, and Chewy. As Carrie Fisher, she's had to

rely on a higher power to save herself from drugs and alcohol. Plus, going to the big show,

Show West. Stick around. It's the best of the business from KCRW.

Thank you. The girl who would become Princess Leia had already had a glamorous but difficult life as Hollywood royalty.

She was born into the spotlight as the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and singer Eddie Fisher.

He left them in a very public way for Elizabeth Taylor when Carrie was two. Her mom then married shoe store

mogul Harry Carl, who would later bankrupt them. Carrie would grow up to have some love troubles of her

own. She had a string of high-profile relationships and had a child by agent Brian Lord, who later left her

for a man. Through it all, Fisher managed to maintain a successful creative career as an author,

film and TV writer, and sometimes actress. She was also battling addiction and mental illness,

and she's lived to tell the tale, with a biting sense of humor in a one-woman show called Wishful Drinking that's now been turned into a book of the same name.

I married Paul at 26. We were divorced at 28.

And then I went to rehab, not because I needed it, but because I was researching my book, Postcards from the Edge.

I'd always written, but when I was 28, I was interviewed by a friend of mine for Esquire magazine.

So I was written by a publishing house, and the letter came to my house and was forwarded to me at the rehab.

So I was very glad to get any mail, but I was glad to get that letter,

and I thought, yes, I'll write a book, and I know what the first line will be.

It'll be, maybe I shouldn't have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone

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