Books: Surrender the Pink By Carrie Fisher (1990)

”Two years after the breakup of her marriage to award-winning playwright Rudy Gendler, Dinah Kaufman remains in limbo, not really wanting him back but lacking a satisfying stand-in. So, idled by a writers' strike, she tails Rudy and his current love, the compliant Lindsey, to the Hamptons. Dinah proves to be the prototypical ‘new woman’' in her uncertainties and gender confusions; she finds it hard to relinquish the ‘pink’ girlish fantasy that a man will indeed secure her happiness ever after. She knows she always seems to love men who later leave her, but understanding this and changing her life for the better pose two distinctly different challenges.”

There are a lot of funny bits in Surrender the Pink, the second novel Fisher wrote after the success of Postcards From the Edge. Dinah is smart, sarcastic, worldly, as well as sad. There are some rather touching bits, as well, and I could help but not feel somewhat connected to the character and the writer. I was also sort of stunned by an exchange about women’s roles in society, and realize more so, that in the near 28 years since this book was released, nothing much has changed. I can see why Carrie Fisher like gay men –they treated her with the respect and love she needed.

This book, also, is long rumored to be loosely based on Fisher’s relationship and short marriage to singer Paul Simon. If it is, both come off fairly evenly here; Fisher does not seem to have too much of an ax to grind. It does highlight, though, what a wonderful, witty woman Fisher was and what we lost when she so unexpectedly left us in 2016.