LOOK! I finally finished this book!
This was the one I started before Egghead. It was such an easy read, but it took me 5ever because of all the running around I've been doing to look for a job, and moving back in with my parents, and just generally being a pathetic, unemployed loser. I am lame. I accept this about myself.
I got this book because, as I've said previously, I LOVE autobiographies by people (celebrity or not) who have been on drugs. I don't know why that it, but it's another one of those little quirks that you just have to accept about yourself and move on, otherwise you'll make yourself miserable and spend all your time and money on therapy. Ain't nobody got time for that.
Carrie Fisher is hilarious. I had already read her previous autobio Wishful Drinking some time ago and I just knew that anything else she put out was going to be hilarious. She's just the right kind of nutty to make you laugh, while only feeling slight discomfort at her sense of humor (I have a similar sense of humor, so I was totally fine with laughing, often out loud).
Shockaholic was pretty much focused on her life before and after the events of Wishful Drinking. She yo-yos back and forth between early early childhood with her parents to after the completion of her book and all the shit that happened then. She pays a lot of special attention to her dad and their individual issues, then their combined issues.
The main subject at the beginning of the book, however, was the concept of practice of ECT (shock therapy basically, just with a more technical sounding name) and how it helped her with her manic depression. The subject actually made me put the book down and think for quite a while about ECT. According to Fisher (ugh, that sounds like a college paper sentence) shock therapy can mess with your memory and the storage part of your brain. She forgets things frequently and has even forgotten words!
I think, as someone who pretends to be a writer (alone, in the dark, where no one else can read it), that is the part of ECT that would scare me the most. I may not be the most loquacious person in the world (but, hey, I know that word means) but words are very important to me. I read them, I write them, I speak them, and I try to learn and use new ones whenever possible. So, to hear that something can take words away from me, that is just about one of the most horrible things I can think of.
The whole thing made me sit back (in the dark again, because that's how I roll) and think about it. Is it really worth it to go through all of that? I've struggled with depression all my life, not quite manic and definitely not the worst I've seen, but it still effects my every day life on a regular basis. Would I want to get rid of that and come out happy on the other side, but at the expense of my memory and my capacity for language?
Maybe I'm reading WAY too much into this, but, hey, that's what books are supposed to do, right? Make you think about shit?
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