Suzanne Vale

Here are the excruciatingly funny adventures of Suzanne Vale - a young film star and drug addict - who survives a rehab clinic only to rejoin the equally harrowing world of Hollywood. Out there on the edge, despair flips into hilarity, and we're left laughing as Suzanne struggles to come to terms with her various fantasylands. This stunning literary debut - read by author and actress Carrie Fisher herself - evokes the deliciously irreverent humor that formed the lens through which Fisher looked at life in the '80s: the stardom, the success, the sex - as well as the drugs, the desperation, and the insecurity.

Suzanne Vale, the Hollywood actress, whose drug addiction and rehab rigors were so brilliantly dissected by Carrie Fisher in Postcards From the Edge, is back. And this time she has a new problem: She's had a child with someone who forgot to tell her he was gay. He forgot to tell her and she forgot to notice. Suzanne's not sure she has what it takes to be the best mother to her daughter, Honey. She can't seem to shake the blues from losing Honey's father to Nick - the man who got the man who got away. Or maybe those aren't the blues, just more symptoms of her sprawling multi-symptomatic bipolar illness: an illness Suzanne can't bring herself to take all that seriously, no matter what her doctors say. How serious can an illness be whose symptoms are spending sprees, substance abuse, and sexual promiscuity? And worst of all, under the watchful round eyes of the pills the doctors' plied her with, her friends are starting to find her a little...boring. The obvious solution is to take a little walk on the wild side. But what starts out as a brief gambol through the scary/fun world of twenty-first-century dating becomes a vigorous jog-trot through the latest drug wonderland - and finally a wild gallop toward a psychotic breakdown and a stay in "the bin." Based on a truant's story, The Best Awful is Carrie Fisher's most powerful and revealing novel: hilarious, moving, and fully informed by the wisdom of a true survivor.