Todd Fisher’s Love Story

Thank you Todd Fisher for your flawless book My Girls: A Lifetime with Carrie and Debbie. It’s so much more than a biography or memoir. It is a love story for two amazing women that anyone with at least half a brain had to love. It’s also a love story for families, and for this family in particular with so many singular talents, who reached the apex of global (possibly intergalactic) cultural adoration, that had at its powerful roots the critical life sustaining nutritive forces of love, faith, family connection, humor, drive, forgiveness, resilience, persistence, making family a priority, caring for each other despite individual imperfections, never giving up on a person or a situation despite facing multiple chronic personal, psychological, medical, and financial crises, and a sustaining love for people. The vastness of such love is literally breathtaking, a celebration of life in all it’s bawdy, vaudevillian, comic incarnations, and a testament to the worth of core values in one’s quiver for life sustainability. 

Todd’s capacity to even craft this comprehensive work so close upon the heels of his enormous loss and the incredibly moving double memorial service he coordinated, is amazing. One of his gifts is organization and never overlooking any detail. Debbie was so concerned about the whereabouts of Carrie’s body immediately following her death, as hospitals have vultures that monetize celebrity stays. When Debbie died, Todd and family friend Gavin de Becker made certain her body was never unguarded. It made me feel good to know that.

While listening to Todd Fisher narrating his audiobook (an Amazon editor’s pick), I came to a part that touched me deeply. It was about his coming of drivers license age (16 in CA) and his mom giving him a choice of what car she would get him. Todd describes how she’d arranged for “Mr. Greenberg who’d maintained their family cars for years to bring a Porsche and a Mercedes to the house for me to choose from for my first car.” When Todd’s reaction was less than Debbie had expected, she asked what kind of car he wanted. He brought a brochure for her to see his dream vehicle: a 1975 GMC motorhome he’d fallen in love with at a local RV show the previous weekend. She was baffled, until he reminded her of a 1969 trip they’d had when he was 10 in a Condor Motorhome with her parents, and Carrie. She drove him to the dealership to buy one. That ‘69 trip encompassed those things most absent from so many Hollywood childhoods. Years later Debbie described their experience in a presentation to an RV group: “We loved it. We camped out, we cooked out, we were family. We were together.” Todd later comments, “As I write this I’m admiring that (his first vehicle) 42 year old GMC motor home through my office window. 

The Unsinkable Molly Brown was my favorite movie growing up, and unsinkability my life’s mantra. I loved Carrie Fisher in Star Wars, her books, and shows, and I absolutely recommend this book to anyone else who shares such interests. It does not disappoint. I loved the audiobook, which Todd excellently narrates, and those moments when you hear and feel the subtle catch in his throat at points along the way, are powerful. He has done right by his girls in this book, and we are all the more enriched because of it.