Late last year, Carrie Fisher and her mother, icon Debbie Reynolds, died within one day of each other. Now, Fisher’s daughter Billie Lourd is opening up about their deaths, and her quirky family upbringing. It may or may not give you all the requisite feels.
The dual deaths hit Lourd hard, but she says that humor go ther through it. “If life’s not funny then it’s just true — and that would be unacceptable,” she tells Town & Country, quoting her mom. “Even when she died, that was what got me through the whole thing. When Debbie died the next day, I could just picture her saying, ‘Well, she’s upstaging me once again, of course — she had to.’”
She also admits to feeling like she was living in their shadows — which yeah, I mean Fisher and Reynolds were both individually very big deals. “I’ve always kind of lived in their shadows, and now is the first time in my life when I get to own my life and stand on my own,” she tells the magazine.
“I love being my mother’s daughter, and it’s something I always will be, but now I get to be just Billie.”
Part of living in Fisher’s shadow was living with a mother who had plenty of her own eccentricities, as the best people do. When Lourd lived with her dather, CAA managing director Bryan Lourd, life was all about routines. “He gets home at the same time every day, and we eat dinner together, we do homework together, we watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and cry, and then go to sleep,” she says.
But with Fisher, things had a bit more pizzazz. “At Mom’s it was like, ‘Let’s put Christmas lights in the palm trees at 2 a.m.’ Do you remember when Sharper Image was 24 hours? We went there all the time, 1 a.m. or 3 a.m., just picking up little trinkets,” she says, “as if that was what you do!” Aw, I wish my mom would have taken me to Sharper Image at 1 in the morning. Now it feels like I’ve barely lived.
Anyway, Fisher and Reynolds are missed deeply, especially by this writer. Here’s hoping Lourd will be able to step out on her own and distinguish herself — it’s what they would want, probably.
