Directed by Mike Nichols and adapted by Carrie Fisher from her own semi-autobiographical novel, Postcards from the Edge stars Meryl Streep as Suzanne Vale, a young actress navigating addiction, recovery, and a famously overbearing showbiz mother (Shirley MacLaine, doing a knowing riff on Debbie Reynolds). Fisher drew directly on her own experiences with substance abuse and her relationship with her mother – turning her private life into a sharp, self-lacerating comedy before the industry could do it for her. Postcards from the Edge is a look behind the Hollywood curtain, written by a woman who understood exactly how the town would try to package her pain and got there first with a better punchline. Suzanne Vale is and isn’t Carrie Fisher; the mother-daughter dynamic is and isn’t the Fisher-Reynolds one, and that layering – fiction as armour, autobiography as art – became a hallmark of everything Fisher wrote afterward, from Wishful Drinking to her later memoirs. Featuring a revolving door of cameos, including from the late greats Rob Reiner and Gene Hackman, in Postcards, Nichols and Fisher neatly skewer the pretensions of fame and grapple with the reality of a ‘nepo baby’ existence. So grab some popcorn and join us as we launch this year’s Scalarama Leeds programme with a celebration of a writer who never let anyone else have the last word on her own story – and a first look at what’s in store across the festival this year! Tickets are Pay What You Can.

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