Postcards from the Edge

Suzanne Vale is a young actress who has ended up in a drug rehabilitation clinic, and she is not sure how she got there. She feels like something stuck to the bottom of a shoe, and not the shoe of anyone interesting. Her days inside are both harrowing and funny.

The book follows her through treatment and then out into ordinary life, where she has to work out how to live after the clinic. Along the way she tries to piece together what went wrong with her career and her sense of herself.

The setting is Hollywood, the world the author knows best. Fisher's own first film role, a precocious teenager in Shampoo, echoed her Beverly Hills upbringing, and this was her first book.

It is a comic novel with a sharp, confessional edge. Drugs and stardom are the surface subject, but the book also looks at the risks and pleasures of other addictions, among them money, success, sex and insecurity. The humor is excruciating at times, and the tone stays vivid from the clinic to the world outside.