Mother Load: Mourning Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher

There is a documentary about Debbie Reynolds’s and Carrie Fisher’s relationship you can find on Amazon Prime. It’s called Intimate Portraits, and I watched it the night after I learned Debbie Reynolds had died from a stroke, just 24 hours after her daughter Carrie Fisher had died. Maybe it was the narrator’s voice, or maybe it was simply the depth of the material, but I found myself cringing all the way through— not because of the two women, but because I felt like I, and the hundreds of thousands of other people who were surely watching it that night too, was peering into something that wasn’t my business—too intimate of a portrait.

All mothers and daughters struggle, to some extent. Women tend to say two things about their mothers: Either they roll their eyes at the mention of her, or they say she’s their “best friend.” The eyeroll always strikes me as more authentic than the “best friend” thing, which—f you, Gilmore Girls—I assume actually means peel back the best-friend charade and you’ll find a seething pit of repressed hatred. But maybe, as a daughter of the eye-rolling variety, I’m just cynical. My own mother is just as attention-hungry as Carrie Fisher felt her mother was. I have an ongoing bet with any friends who meet her: If she doesn’t make sure you know she’s a doctor in the first two minutes of meeting her, I’ll give you a hundred bucks. I’ve never had to pay up. When she first finished medical school, she signed all credit-card payments with the initials “MD” at the end—you know, so that the wait staff would be impressed. My mother always wished I had done something more glamorous with my life, such as married a Moroccan prince or become an acclaimed doctor myself.

Fisher, as we know from Postcards From the Edge, Wishful Drinking, and her just-released book, The Princess Diarist, was most certainly an eye roller as well. She believed her mother to be the most beautiful, glamorous person in the world, but she also kind of couldn’t stand her. Carrie was furious at her mother’s dependence on men, at how she let herself get left by them again and again. From the time she was a young teenager, she worked hard to defy her mother’s wishes, starting with girl scouts, increasing to whether she should have a singing career and which movie roles she should take. In a hilarious example, Fisher’s first role was in the 1975 Warren Beatty classic Shampoo, as the daughter of a movie star; when Beatty’s hairdressing Lothario compares her eyes to her mother’s, Fisher’s character explodes: “I’m nothing like my mother!”

In her desperation to separate, Fisher turned to drugs and romance, and as she approached what no one yet knew was the middle of her life, she found herself divorced and in rehab after a nearly lethal overdose. Later, she would find herself a single mother, just like her own mother had been. In rehab, Debbie came rushing to her side. In the movie of Postcards from the Edge—in which Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine play Fisher and Reynolds—the mother muses, “Ever since you were a little girl, I had this feeling that I’d lose you, that you’d be taken from me early.” It’s powerful, not only because of the foreshadowing but because it reflects a profound truth: A mother has to lose her daughter in order for that daughter to become her own person, and there is indeed a sort of death in that, a loss of identity for both. Surely this is why daughters so often slam their bedroom doors, yell “I hate you!” in adolescence, and then spend much of their adulthoods rolling their eyes.

The scariest thing about being a daughter is the idea that you won’t ever be able to separate from your mother and all she represents. A significant other says, “You’re just like your mother,” and, whether they’ve said it as an innocuous comment or not, to you it’s as though they’ve suggested you’re the most disgusting, most horrible monster possible. I certainly fear the ways I am, in fact, a lot like my mother. Indeed, though her desire for attention has simply been more general than mine, my first memoir was about how I spent most of my life craving attention from men. The beauty of watching Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher’s relationship is seeing how human it was. Beyond all the opulence and newsworthy drama, there was nothing all that unique about it. Their relationship was like all of ours: We love our mothers as much as we can’t stand them, and when our daughters separate from us we feel like we can’t live.

In the end, Fisher never did manage to separate fully from her mother: It’s scary to say it, but maybe none of us daughters ever do. Mother and daughter were, famously, next-door neighbors in Hollywood’s Coldwater Canyon and, though it sounds almost too cinematically on the nose, Reynolds’s reported last words were “I want to be with Carrie.” They looked into one another’s faces at the end and saw their own. They both knew, at the end, that life will take as much as it has to give; it will break your heart again and again. Like in the song Meryl Streep’s character sings at the end of Postcards from the Edge: “I’m checking out of this heartbreak hotel.” That’s what they did, together.

Kerry Cohen is an author and counselor living in Portland, Oregon. Her newest book is Girl Trouble (Hawthorne Books).