…Carrie says it wasn’t always easy to be the daughter of such a glamorous woman. “I thought I looked like a thumb,” she says.
“My mother would get up in the morning as my mother and then she would go into this big closet she had,” she says. “She’d go in on this end as my mom and she’d come out the other end as Debbie Reynolds. It was like a car wash for celebrities.”
Even in her days as a sci-fi pin-up, Carrie says she thought she was fat. “My self-image is just whacked from having the movie star mom,” she says.
Debbie says she knew growing up wasn’t easy for Carrie. “When she was in grammar school, the teacher one day, she kept calling Carrie ‘Debbie,’” Debbie says. “It’s okay because I’m Princess Leia’s mother so everywhere I go, [I say] ‘I’m Princess Leia’s mother’ now.”…
…In Carrie’s early 20s, she says she had a fairly volatile relationship with her mother. “I didn’t want to be around her,” she says. “I did not want to be Debbie Reynolds’ daughter.”
Debbie says that was a painful time for her. “It’s very hard when your child doesn’t want to talk to you but you want to talk to them,” she says. “That was the most difficult time of all.”
Carrie says she was angry. “You’re individuating yourself. This is a very powerful person and in order to have my own identity, I have to sort of forge some kind of character out of nothing,” she says. “I wanted my own life and her life was crazy at that time and I was in it.”
Still, Carrie says she had empathy for her mother. Carrie says Debbie often confided in her daughter about her marital problems. “I did know what was going on in there. And it was chaos. And it was hard for all of us,” Carrie says. “I wanted to protect her. I felt horrible for her”…
