The Best Awful (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Suzanne Vale had a problem, and it was the one she least liked thinking about: She'd had a child with someone who forgot to tell..." (more)
Key Phrases: Shady Lanes, Dean Bradbury, Big Bird (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Carrie Fisher's The Best Awful returns Postcards from the Edge fans to the often hilarious, occasionally tragic, but always captivating world of Suzanne Vale, a bi-polar, celebrity talk show host with a six-year old daughter, a gay ex-husband, an aging starlet mother, and an unbreakable will to survive. After Suzanne stops taking her medication, Fisher treats us to the wild, hysterical ride that follows Suzanne's manic episodes, including a search for Oxycontin in Tijuana with her tattoo artist and a new house guest in the form of Hoyt, a clinically depressed patient Suzanne picks up at her psychopharmacologist's office. Even after the inevitable psychotic break lands Suzanne at Shady Lanes, where she's the "latest loony to hit the bin," Fisher never deviates from her trademark wit and uncanny ability to find truth in every irony:

You entered the hospital broken, found some other like broken patient people, and once in their company, looked down on the other more pathetic inhabitants of the bin you shared, those flying even lower than you and your lo-flung co-conspirators...

An insider's look at the Hollywood most of us only read about in supermarket checkout lines, The Best Awful doesn't strive to be anything other than what it is--a rambunctious, honest, wise-cracking trip to rock bottom and back again. Supporting characters are just that, a backdrop against whom Suzanne hopes to find a plausible sense of self. For readers who can accept this novel for what it is, The Best Awful promises over 250 pages of uninhibited entertainment. --Gisele Toueg

From Publishers Weekly

The inimitable Suzanne Vale returns to battle her demons (drugs, bipolar disorder and Hollywood self-obsession) in actress and screenwriter Fisher's blackly comic sequel to Postcards from the Edge. Leland Franklin, a studio executive whose protectiveness helped Suzanne find her "far-flung best self," dumps her-for a man-when their beloved daughter, Honey, is three, and Suzanne is left "with a child, a grudge, and a bright phosphorous gnaw of pain glowing in the hot spot of her chest." Three years later, Suzanne is still struggling. Though born into show business, then a film star, now a successful talk show hostess (much like her creator), it's Suzanne's love for Honey that keeps her going-oh, and prescription drugs. She has a friend in Craig, a fellow court jester and "DNA jackpot" who pulls her out of tight spots, each "one more in a long line of bad judgment calls." After Suzanne and a tattoo artist named Tony hit Tijuana in a quest for Oxycontin, for example, Craig comes to her rescue. But the trip has "pulled crazy closer to her," and Suzanne experiences a psychotic break that lands her in the Shady Lanes loony bin. Pharmacological facts and scenes from group therapy are revealed with Fischer's trademark irony and nonstop wisecracks. Rather than hide the painful truths of mental disorders, her humor serves to highlight them. Fischer contrives a Hollywood happy ending for Suzanne and Honey, a sweet child who will win readers' hearts, but a little joy amid all the craziness is just what the doctor ordered.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition; First Printing edition (January 6, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684809133
• ISBN-13: 978-0684809137
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #717,579 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No bull, no boring roman a clef, just a gem..., January 6, 2004

By	L Goodman-Malamuth "Leslie Goodman-Malamuth" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Arthur Miller, the playwright, once said something along the lines of, "Agony, sure I have agony. But everybody has agony. The difference is that I take mine home and try to make it sing."

From Carrie Fisher, we get an aria, and quite a successful one at that. I was expecting to be entertained by The Best Awful, and I was, yet the novel is far more satisfying than Hollywood fluff. Whatever insights the author has earned through her turbulent/famous/funny life have given her depth and substance as an author. Fisher offers up sharp dialogue (not just a string of one-liners), a vivid but unpreachy view of mental health and its absence, and characters so real that I expected to see them sitting next to me on the sofa.

Wow.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, January 20, 2004

By A Customer

"The Best Awful" is wonderful, a compelling work whose humor belies a heartrending truth. In dealing with mental illness, Fisher doesn't sanitize insanity, but gives us a hard, unsparing look at what happens when a mind is lost, or rather, when it's found on an out-of-this-world plane. She takes us along a harrowing trip, harnessed to fast, furious, and funny prose. The strange thing is, it's a curl-up-under-the-covers read, a safe haven, where not only do you appreciate your own boring "normalcy," you develop a compassion you never knew you had. While Suzanne Vale's pain is so real, her rantings so over-the-detailed-top, it's her humanity that's still front and center -- an amoral ethicist pontificating on what it means to live a large life made larger by turning small. You have to read it to get that line! A beautifully done job. Fisher is a celebrity who truly deserves to be celebrated. And no, I'm not a friend, and until now, I wasn't a thumbs-up-to-the-sky fan.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A poignant, funny look at bipolar disorder...very readable!, February 6, 2004

By	Invisiboy2001 "invisiboy2001" (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews

I have read all four of Carrie Fisher's novels, and this one is my second favorite, after the charming, hilarious "Delusions of Grandma." This novel includes many colorful central and secondary characters, but none as vibrant as Suzanne Vale, the bipolar heroine.

"The Best Awful" takes the reader on a roller-coster ride from the stability of everyday "sane" life through the perils of meltdown...and all the way to the loony bin and out again. Laced with Fisher's winning humor and alarming literacy, this novel is a winner from beginning to end. The ride will keep you laughing and leave you a little sad, but ultimately "The Best Awful" serves as a satifying read.