When we first meet actress Suzanne Vale, she's feeling like "something on the bottom of someone's shoe, and not even someone interesting." Suzanne is in rehab, trying to understand what happened to her life and how she managed to land in a "drug hospital." Just as Carrie Fisher's first film role as the precocious teenager in Shampoo echoed her own Beverly Hills upbringing, her first book is set within a world she knew all too well—Hollywood in the 1980s. More of a montage than a novel in the conventional sense, this semi-autobiographical literary debut—which Fisher later adapted into the film of the same name—chronicles Suzanne's absurd, excruciatingly funny journey from the clinic back to the outside world.