Carrie Fisher tells all in memoir

Carrie Fisher (pictured), the actress who played Princess Leia in the Star Wars movies and went on to write the acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel Postcards from the Edge, has not pulled her punches in a forthcoming memoir Wishful Drinker, to be published in December. In addition to coming clean about her various battles with drink and drugs, which at one point led to her committal to a mental hospital, she also takes a few well-aimed swipes at her former husband, Bryan Lourd, who has claimed in the past that her use of codeine turned him into a homosexual.

She says of Lourd, an executive with the CCA talent agency: "He told me later that I had turned him gay . . . by taking codeine again. And I said, 'You know, I never read that warning on the label.' I thought it said 'heavy machinery,' not homosexuality - turns out I could have been driving those tractors all along!'"

She is also scathing about her father, Eddie Fisher, who left her mother Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor after Taylor's husband, Mike Todd, died in a plane crash: "Naturally, my father flew to Elizabeth's side, gradually making his way to her front. He first dried her eyes with his handkerchief, consoled her with flowers, and ultimately consoled her with his penis."

She also reveals how when she made Star Wars in 1977 the director George Lucas persuaded her not to wear a bra on set by telling her "There's no underwear in space".

Of her first husband, the singer and composer Paul Simon, who wrote Graceland and many other songs about her, she notes that he wasn't always as nice as his public image suggests. Once, as he drove her to the airport, she turned to him and said, "You'll feel bad if I crash." To this, she says he shrugged and replied: "Maybe not".