About a year ago I approached Carrie Fisher to write a column for the Guardian. With other A-listers, it’s all too common to be rebuffed by several layers of management, publicists and protective naysayers. But somehow – all too easily – I found myself with an invitation to her house in Beverly Hills.

And what a house it is. Huge neon arrows and signs hang from trees in the driveway. It wasn’t Christmas, but a fully lit tree was the centrepiece of her living room (it was there year-round). A giant moose head with a fez hung above the fireplace; snow globes depicting macabre murder scenes decorated the shelves and, outside in the garden, next to a life-size Leia stepping out of a British telephone box, was the back end of a lion attached to the wall, its raised tail revealing giant cat balls.

Carrie was delayed, having spent the morning looking after her mum, Debbie Reynolds, whose house is on the same grounds: a big “Debbie” made of light-bulbs pointed the way to her property in their shared driveway. Reynolds had suffered two strokes; she and her daughter saw each other nearly every day. When Carrie finally appeared, she told me that Debbie, on hearing they had a visitor, had assumed I was there to speak to her, as Hollywood royalty, and declared: “I can’t see anyone.” Her daughter had kept up the fiction.

I had been expecting maybe an hour of her time, but somehow we ended up spending the entire day together: I was pressed to drink bottles of wine she had picked for their rude or amusing names (she didn’t drink – saying she couldn’t trust her addictive personality). We shopped, ate homemade banana pudding out of the dish and plotted how we were going to get her a boyfriend (her desire for companionship and sex were to become a running theme).

We began chatting in her bedroom, the walls and ceilings decorated by projections of fluttering butterflies. Gary – her French bulldog, whose tongue steadfastly refuses to stay in his mouth – lay snoring next to a Gary-themed gift director JJ Abrams had presented to Carrie at the wrap party for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The film had just been released, and Carrie had quickly become everyone’s favourite part of the promotional tour. She shot down anyone who asked about her weight loss for the role and had recently asked, via Twitter, for everyone to stop debating whether or not she had aged well – as it hurt “all three of my feelings”.

Like everything Carrie said or did, that tweet revealed a truth – she told me she hated the way she looked in that film and suddenly, unexpectedly, she was in tears.

Minutes later she was in high spirits, plotting to tweet an old photo she had unearthed from the first set of Star Wars in which she was cupping C-3PO’s balls. “This is going to get me in trouble with the people at Disney,” she said, while I held the pic steady and she snapped, “but I don’t care.”

She revealed that the resurrection of the franchise had been a huge financial boost – she had agreed to the “teeniest-tiniest percentage of a percentage of a percentage” of the backend profits and knew she never had to worry about money again.

And she was beyond generous. She thrust presents on her staff and insisted we went shopping to find gifts for her mum, daughter and others. (When we eventually got around to talking about the column she asked to be paid in fun presents rather than money – an idea her agent sadly nixed when it was up and running.)

I was gone so long that my husband texted to see if I was OK, in response to which she sent a video of herself riffing about how she was going to do bad things to me and make me vote for Donald Trump in the upcoming election.

In every store we went into she was a hurricane of energy and charisma and foul language – and she was instantly loved. She swore loudly at the shop assistants that didn’t have the particular light she sought in stock and laughed hysterically at a bed we saw that was priced at over $100,000 – then made me pose comic-seductively across it while she took photos. The staff all took it in their stride.

The column cast Carrie as an agony aunt and was a huge hit, but getting it out of her was like pulling teeth. She was in such high demand – filming Star Wars, the hit TV comedy series Catastrophe and writing a book – I often didn’t hear from her for weeks on end. Then suddenly, out of the blue, my phone would buzz multiple times.

“I’m a giant asshole. It’s official.”

“I’ll try to make it up to u.”

“If it takes all our sad, exciting lives.”

“It’s Carrie F gunning for contact.”

“Will wait breathlessly and nude.”

I read every problem she was emailed for the column, and a running theme was what an inspiration she was to so many people living with mental illness: the inbox piled up with the young, the old, the depressed and bipolar, all thanking her for how open she was about her own disorder.

Recently, Carrie was interviewed by my colleague Simon Hattenstone and talked about how she hoped to find a boyfriend, relaying to Simon, as she did to me, how she wanted a “British professor who will be able to put up with me, so you can put the word out. Good sense of humour, intelligent, not hideously unattractive, and sort of confident without being arrogant.”

Shortly afterwards, a Guardian reader wrote to offer himself as a potential suitor and I forwarded his message to her. She called me back to say she would meet him. She was impressed he had put himself forward, because “I’m not the kind of person you read an interview with and think: ‘I want to date her.’”

Carrie asked me to visit her in London before she flew back to LA just before Christmas; I couldn’t. It was on that flight that she had a heart attack.

We spoke two weeks before her death and she was in high spirits – funny, honest, open, without artifice. She talked at length about how much she liked her daughter’s new boyfriend and how proud she was of her. Carrie had just bought a house in London and wanted to spend more time in the UK but knew that she couldn’t leave her mum alone in LA. When she joined the Guardian as a guest for Barack Obama’s final White House Correspondents’ dinner the last thing she did before leaving the taxi was call Reynolds. “Mommy, I love you,” she said.

Since Fisher’s death, emails for her have continued to pour in at the Guardian address. “Hi Carrie,” one reads. “I know you’re dead. But that shouldn’t stop you from continuing to respond to those who are sick and suffering, because come on, you were super-human in life – and in death you’ve become even more powerful.”