cover image My Girls: A Lifetime with Carrie and Debbie

My Girls: A Lifetime with Carrie and Debbie

Todd Fisher, with Lindsay Harrison. Morrow, $27.99 (400p) ISBN 978-0-06-279231-0

Fisher, son of Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds and younger brother of actress Carrie Fisher, offers a frequently hilarious and too often heartbreaking story of life with the women he called “my girls.” As a member of a troubled family who, in his sister’s phrasing, “wore our underwear on the outside of our clothes,” Fisher candidly portrays a lifetime of crises, beginning when his father, singer Eddie Fisher, left Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor only weeks after Fisher’s birth. Reynolds’s next two husbands both gambled and stole from her, leaving her millions of dollars in debt. The peacemaker in the family, Fisher dealt with his sister’s mood swings, later diagnosed as symptoms of bipolar disorder, and with the incessant competition between mother and daughter. Even as Fisher carved out his own life, pursuing a career making television shows and documentaries and becoming a born-again Christian, his mother and sister’s needs dominated his life until their deaths in 2016, just one day apart. More than a Hollywood tell-all, Fisher’s memoir of a family’s love and endurance under trying and sometimes outrageous circumstances is a clear-eyed tribute to lives lived to the fullest.[em] (June) [/em]