Carrie Fisher Wrote a Script, Not a Book

Carrie Fisher's latest collection of wisecracks and kvetching rants is less a book than a standup comedy routine that you read while sitting down. Reading, in fact, hardly suits it: what she has written is a script for the eventual, inevitable audiobook. Even silenced on the page, Fisher's voice is shrill, even shrieky, as if it were amplified, and her staccato sentences and truncated paragraphs leave plenty of room for out-loud laughter.