Carrie's war

When I first met Carrie Fisher, five years ago, at her rambling house in the Hollywood Hills, I thought something was going on. We spent an evening together during the course of which she ordered a huge amount of takeaway food which she didn't eat. Instead she leapt up and down from the dining table at regular intervals. She ate mouthloads of pills, talked on the telephone off and on most of the night and generally acted like someone who wasn't having a particularly good time in her life.

At the time, she claimed to be perfectly fine. Her now ex-husband, Hollywood talent agent Bryan Lourd, had recently run off with another man - it was someone who moved in the same circles as Michael Jackson. She said that, yes, it was horribly humiliating, but that she was coping.

"Someone I knew vaguely said, 'At least he ran off with a man. If he'd run off with another woman then you would've felt very rejected.' Now, why didn't I manage to see it like that?" she joshed. And her father, former crooner Eddie Fisher, had just written an autobiography that she hated. "It was rude about my mother. It was like one big diary of who he'd shagged." But then she said she didn't even really mind that as she'd always thought he was a bit of a schmuck. "I'm fine," she said. She pointed at her then six-year-old daughter (with Lourd), Billie, who was sleeping beatifically on her bed. "I have her," she said and that was that.

But now, here we are in the Savoy Hotel in London, and it turns out that, of course, Carrie Fisher wasn't at all fine.

"Did I say it was all great then?" she asks, looking vaguely horrified and amused at the same time. "I can't remember. I really can't." Then again, she says, she can't remember anything very much about vast chunks of her life. "I have spent a lot of my life not really being that aware of what I am doing," she says, "and I can't bear to keep calling people up and saying, 'Do you remember what happened to me in the late 1990s, because I can't.'"

The problem - well, this most recent and pressing problem because, believe me, there's a whole heap of them before this - is that, five years ago, Fisher was recovering from a severe mental breakdown. "I had a total freakout," she says. "I'd been awake for six days on the trot and then I'd taken these pills to put me to sleep and they didn't work, so I read the instructions and thought maybe I should take some more, so I did and ..."

Essentially, she overdosed, ended up in hospital and, after physically recovering, found she had quite lost her mind. I ask her how she knew. I mean, if you're mad, how do you know you're mad?

"I don't think I did know at first," she says. "But I saw people looking at me with excruciating pain and sadness in their eyes and I knew I had caused it. For a while I wasn't sure what had happened. I was in such a drugged-up state that everything seemed very muffled. I didn't seem to have any sense of reality."

After she was discharged from hospital she went to a care home. "It's for mentally insane people!" she says. "When the people who run it came to interview me, they said I wasn't mad enough to be admitted. Luckily I got worse and then they took me in."

All this would be fine, amusing even, the way she tells it, if she didn't have her daughter. She obviously adores Billie. She talks about her all the time - how she goes to a private school in Beverly Hills and is so good at science and maths, and how she is so together and sensible.

"I feel so protective of my daughter," she says. "I always wanted her not to grow up in LA and have this type of life but her father is here. Billie is very cool. She has plans. She's going to Harvard." Was Billie aware of what was going on? "Of course she was," says Fisher. "Children always are. It was terrifying for her, I'm sure. She went to stay with her father and came to see me when I wasn't in the middle of being psychotic. But I'd get freaked out because, however mad I was feeling, I knew I'd messed the whole thing up and I was terrified that she'd get taken away from me and that would make things even worse.

"I'm not excusing my behaviour. I'd always been told I was manic depressive but never really believed it. It's called a new name now - bipolar syndrome. All modern depressives are bipolar but I prefer manic depression because it sounds more romantic."

There is nothing at all romantic about it. She is short, only 5ft 1in, and almost as round - her weight ballooned because of her medication. She can talk about pills, and the effect they have - not only on her body but on her mind - for hours. "The problem," she says, "is that you get addicted to it. When I left the mental hospital I had to go into rehab about a year later. My doctors, my therapist, they have to monitor me all the time. The pills can help my mental imbalance but it almost drives me insane when I think what they are doing to my body."

Her legs obviously hurt, her feet are swollen, and she gets breathless quickly. Some days she feels better, some days worse. She finds it hard to walk far in shoes because they squash her feet. She is only 47 but looks older. It's not her face, though. She has always been pretty, attractive, dark. Even though it is nearly 30 years since she played Princess Leia in Star Wars she hasn't lost that essence of cheekiness and defiance that worked so well on screen.

But even though she is so well-known for Star Wars, her more successful career has been as a writer. Her first book, Postcards from the Edge, published in 1987, was about a pill-popping, drugged-out movie star - ie, herself - struggling to cope with life. It was made into a film with Meryl Streep, and Shirley MacLaine as the mother.

Her next, Surrender the Pink, seemed to be based on her intense relationship and break-up with singer Paul Simon. They were together for seven years but married for only 11 months before they parted. "I suppose in a weird and twisted way he was the love of my life," she says. "When we split I asked him for nothing. Not a penny. We had no children together and I felt I owed him nothing and he owed me nothing. Since then, I have been writing to make ends meet. My friends have told me I was quite mad not to go for alimony. They are probably right, but I don't care."

Her third book, Delusions of Grandma, published in 1994, is about mothering and childbirth. "Of course, my books are all autobiographical," she says. Her latest, The Best Awful, is about a woman (Suzanne Vale, the heroine, as such, in Postcards) who unwittingly marries a gay man and has a daughter but then takes an overdose soon after the breakdown of the marriage and ends up living very much on the edge ... But Carrie Fisher is probably always on the edge of something.

She takes great leaps backwards and forwards in her conversation. She is very funny and droll and switched-on about the most excruciating of experiences. She is a marvellous gossip because she knows absolutely everybody. She tells me about X, the bigname Hollywood actor who is a massive control freak, and Y, the very thin actress who insisted Fisher accompany her to the loo when "we'd only just met!" she says, scandalised. "I said to Diane Keaton 'That woman's a nutter! I only watch people pee when I know them really well, like after six weeks or so!"

It is as if she cannot help but acquire people and experiences. She tells me, excitedly, that her friend Helen Fielding, the Bridget Jones author, has just had a baby. She talks about Fielding as if they have been lifelong pals and yet, five years ago, I don't suppose she'd even met her.

But that's Fisher for you. She loves new places, new things. Another new best friend is Graham Norton, whom she adores. Yet Fisher obviously has this protective, jokey layer. Maybe it's her way of taking her fears and making them hers?

"Well, that's exactly it," she says. "If I joke about something I feel I have conquered it. Instead of other people gossiping away about 'Ooh, what's wrong with Carrie' I'm just very open about it. I wrote this last book because I wanted to keep a journal of what had happened, but it was too grim and painful to write as non-fiction."

But what difference does it make? The book is so obviously autobiographical ... "Yes, but it's funny," she says. "I like funny."

She does, however, accept that being funny hasn't solved her problems. "I used to joke about being diagnosed as manic depressive," she says. "I thought I had labelled that box and shut the lid but it still came back to get me, didn't it?" She's not even sure where all this trauma comes from. "I don't feel I'm particularly messed up. I've always been quite sane about being insane."

She could, of course, point to her childhood. She has always lived her life in the public eye. When she was only two days old her mother, Debbie Reynolds, and father were photographed beaming at her when they took her out of hospital. Then there were endless photographs of herself and her mother shopping, crossing the street, eating ice cream.

"Oh, it was all very whiter-than-white when I was born," she says, "although my mother collapsed with exhaustion and my father fainted at the birth, so guess what? They took centre-stage while I was left-of-centre for a while. It was always like that."

She spent her childhood trying to catch up with her mother. "I always thought she was very beautiful and I wasn't," she says. But her mother was shattered when Eddie Fisher ran off with her best friend, Elizabeth Taylor. "My mother had dispatched Eddie to look after Elizabeth when her husband Mike Todd died in a plane crash. He never returned!"

As an adolescent, Fisher and her brother, Todd, whom she points out has never had a pill problem, followed their mother round the country. "We used to spend months on end messing around in elevators in Vegas while she performed. We had a pretty free childhood. I loved it really." But her mother ended up penniless after she married an inveterate gambler, although she is now enjoying a comeback playing Debra Messing's mother in TV sitcom Will and Grace.

Her father ended up disappearing with just about whoever. And Carrie Fisher ended up in rehab and AA and NA in her mid-twenties. "I thought I had the problem licked but I obviously didn't."

So what caused her latest relapse? In The Best Awful it's because Suzanne Vale hits a certain age and just can't bear the fact that she's growing older and is being so well-behaved and controlled. "It was like that," says Fisher. "I know I must behave. Believe me, I can't tell you how hard it is. I've been an addict for so many years that it's my personality. Now I'm on so many drugs I see myself through a fog."

She is determined to stick with it, though, because of Billie. "When I came home, I had to spend a long time trying to explain to Billie what had happened. It was very difficult. I made a commitment to her and I was fortunate she came back to me. She is a very special girl."

She pauses to drink the last of a long line of Diet Cokes. "I thought I'd be all stylish and sorted in my late forties with tiny high heels and a strappy, classy little handbag. But Billie and her friends look at us mothers and think we're just weird and sad. I think that's what is hard to come to terms with."