Carrie Fisher has won a posthumous Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album, for the audiobook recording of her memoir The Princess Diarist. This memoir was based on the handwritten diaries that young Fisher kept during the filming of Star Wars, which began when she was 19 years old. Looking over these diaries as an older woman, Fisher was astonished by their “youthful naiveté, and a vulnerability that she barely recognized,” and so she wrote The Princess Diarist to reflect on the journey between this past self and her present one.
The Grammys’ Best Spoken Word category covers poetry, audio books, and storytelling, while audio comedy recordings compete in their own separate category. Fisher beat the following nominees:
- Neil Degrasse Tyson for Astrophysics For People In A Hurry
- Bruce Springsteen for Born To Run
- Shelly Peiken, the creator of hundreds of hits like Christina Aguilera’s “Come on Over Baby,” for Confessions Of A Serial Songwriter
- Bernie Sanders and Mark Ruffalo for Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In
Fisher has been nominated in the Best Spoken Word category before, for the audiobook recording of another memoir, Wishful Drinking. This, however, is her first win.
Since she passed away in 2016, Fisher has also been nominated for a posthumous Emmy for her guest role on Amazon’s Catastrophe, but this Grammy win feels particularly meaningful. As I wrote back when she was first nominated, this recording of The Princess Diarist represents her words, in her voice. It epitomizes her commitment to telling her own story, with her own humor and unflinching honesty about mental health, addiction, and life in the limelight. She meant a lot to fans as a sci-fi Princess-General. But she also gave a lot of us hope for a world where women can be themselves, fully human and clearly complicated, and where we can erase the stigmas around mental health and addiction to help people get the help and support they need.
The Princess Diarist captured both those sides of Fisher, and so I’m really glad she took home the Grammy.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter; image: Penguin Random House)
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