Aside from her wildly successful acting career, Carrie Fisher was a celebrated writer, penning novels like Postcards from the Edge (which was later turned into a film starring Meryl Streep—Fisher wrote the screenplay), and autobiographical works like Wishful Drinking, Shockaholic, and this year's The Princess Diarist. She was also a successful script doctor, sharpening films like Hook and Sister Act. Fisher, who died Tuesday at the age of 60, lived a colorful life outside of her career as well. As the daughter of Hollywood royalty, she was almost predestined to have many star-studded romances of her own.

Paul Simon, the celebrated musician who was formerly married to the star, shared a few words Wednesday morning about the Star Wars icon's surprising death.

Fisher and Simon's romantic relationship was a long, well-documented one that lasted several years, and one of many in Fisher's life that continue to fascinate, as much for the high-wattage celebrities involved as for Fisher's witty description of them. Like many other things in her life, Fisher spun her own unique narratives out of tabloid-ready stories, often writing about them in her books.

In Wishful Drinking, she frankly discussed her relationship with Simon. They married in 1983, then divorced the following year. “Then we dated again,” Fisher wrote. “We were together for more than 12 years (off and on) and we traveled a lot. The last place we went to was the Amazon, which I recommend if you like mosquitoes.”

Fisher was candid about the ups and downs of their relationship, noting that Simon wrote two songs about her: “She Moves On” and “Hearts and Bones.”

“I was good for material, but when it came to day-to-day living, I was more than he could take,” she writes. “We once had a fight (on our honeymoon) where I said: 'Not only do I not like you, I don't like you personally!' We tried to keep the argument going after that but we were laughing too hard.”

In the Simon biography Homeward Bound, author Peter Ames Carlin writes that the pair “fought a lot,” spurred along in part by Fisher's reported drug abuse and mental-health issues, but they always found a way to push through hardship. They eventually ended things for good after that previously mentioned trip to the Amazon, where they visited a brujo and “drank a special tea made from the leaves of a psychedelic plant and caapi vine—a recipe designed to cleanse their spirits.” Fisher then said “she had a vision” about “feeling pinned beneath Paul’s ever-spinning, ever-controlling brain; about the way he, like so many powerful men she knew, assumed his expertise and control over every situation.” They left Brazil and that was that—the relationship came to a final end.

Fisher’s romantic relationships have always been a thing of intrigue, topics she was more than willing to explore in numerous interviews. In between her on-again, off-again relationship with Simon, she was also briefly engaged to Dan Aykroyd, whom she met on the set of The Blues Brothers. One day while they were hanging out in his trailer, he saved her life after she started choking on a piece of food.

“He was forcing me to eat because I was very thin in those days—no longer—and I inhaled a Brussels sprout, and I started choking,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 2008. “He thought I was laughing, and then he saw that I was dying, and he did the Heimlich maneuver, and then like 10 minutes later he asked me to marry him, and I thought, 'I better marry him. What if that happens again?' We had rings, we got blood tests, the whole shot. But then I got back together with Paul Simon.”

In a 1987 interview with The Washington Post, she also revealed that she dated a U.S. senator, though she wouldn't reveal his name. “I was shown the Supreme Court and taken to dinner, and I said at one point, ‘So, how many senators are there, actually?’ I told my mother that later and she said, ‘Oh darling, I’m so ashamed of you. Everyone knows there’s one per state.’ ”

Shortly before her death, Fisher also revealed in new book, The Princess Diarist, that she had had an affair with co-star Harrison Ford while filming Star Wars: A New Hope. Fisher was 19 at the time; Ford was 33, married to Mary Marquardt, and had two children.

“It was Han and Leia during the week, and Carrie and Harrison during the weekend,” Fisher told People.

In Diarist, she included diary entries she wrote at the time of the affair; in excerpts (which fans have shared online) Fisher is riddled with youthful insecurity, both captivated by Ford, and turned off by his stoicism. It should also come as no surprise that even at such a young age, Fisher was a supremely gifted writer.

“He is like a fantasy,” she writes. “The inevitability of his escape is most likely his most attractive feature. He submits to the silences without a struggle; I go under shrugging and sighing, finally overcome by the sheer weight of the pause-turned-lull-turned-way-of-life.”