In Her Own Words, Carrie Fisher Proves Quite a Character : Writing: The actress turned novelist, known for tapping her personal life for her books, enlivens authors luncheon with humorous but fictional scenarios.

She’s been described as Hollywood’s modern-day Dorothy Parker, and actress-author Carrie Fisher didn’t disappoint during a brief talk at an authors luncheon Tuesday.

Introduced as the owner of a Spanish-style ranch house in Beverly Hills that cost $2.5 million, Fisher cringed and put her head in her hands.

“Thank you for that introduction,” she said, then sighed heavily: “I’m always pleased to hear my house cost $2.5 million and (realize) that I cannot afford it. I basically belong to the bank now.”

Fisher, the actress daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, is best known to moviegoers as Princess Leia in “Star Wars.” But over the past seven years she has carved out a successful career as a writer of bitingly witty novels, including her latest, “Delusions of Grandma.”

Fisher was one of three authors on the bill at The Times Orange County Edition’s seventh annual Book and Author Luncheon at the Red Lion Hotel. Speaking before a sold-out crowd of 750, she was joined by John Berendt (“Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”) and Ursula Hegi (“Stones from the River”).

Conceding that she hadn’t prepared much in the way of a talk, Fisher, 37, said that when she hears her life and accomplishments chronicled in an introduction, either she thinks, “I don’t want to be that person,” or she wonders, “Who is that?”

She recalled a talk-show host once asking, “So, what are you doing now?”

To which Fisher, tongue in cheek, replied: “I’m starting a new magazine called Deserted Woman. . . . There’s going to be a fashion segment on what to wear when you’re just dumped, then two months later, then six. There’s going to be a perfume with that slightly discarded air.

“I said, ‘Basically, I’m going to make it it hip to be dumped. And there’s going to be, of course, a special fold-out supplement for if you’re dumped with kids.’ So the woman says to me, ‘So, you’re starting a clothing line?’ ”

On a certain level, Fisher told the audience, “I could say that I was doing anything because it makes no linear sense that I’ve gone from being someone that shot laser pistols at Wookies in outer space and I write novels. So I could go on a TV show and say, ‘Yes, I’m running for Congress’--and they would believe me.”

Fisher is known as much for tapping her personal life for her novels as she is for her humor. In “Postcards From the Edge,” it was her recovery from drug abuse. In “Surrender the Pink,” it was the breakup of her marriage to singer Paul Simon. And in “Delusions of Grandma,” it’s her breakup with agent Bryan Lourd and the birth of her first child, Billie.

But there’s something of a price to pay for mining one’s own life for fiction.

Readers, Fisher said, “do seem very comfortable in believing that I take notes at night and it all falls out in a kind of organized entertainment (fashion). Like I just stayed at the rehab and made notes, and I knew it would make a good novel.”

Emotionally what she writes is always true, she said, but that doesn’t mean everything she writes should be taken at face value. Still, she said, “the power of the written word is extraordinary.”

“In my first book I said somebody shot heroin. And my mother said, ‘People are going to think that that’s you.’ And I thought, ‘No, they’re going to think that’s your daughter. . . .’ ”