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Original Essays | June 12, 2013
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More copies of this ISBNThis title in other editionsA Life in Smoke: A Memoirby Julia Hansen
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:I accepted the certainty of my untimely death with gallows humor and a calculator. I'd read somewhere that each cigarette you smoke knocks seven minutes off your time on the planet. To amuse myself, I did the math: 153,000 cigarettes = two years of my life, up in smoke."
Julia Hansen first lit up at nineteen. Twenty years later, she was editing books about health — and smoking a pack or two a day. She denied her son fast food, but smoked in the house and car; curtailed his video games, but lit up at his soccer matches. Despite repeated attempts to quit, she always crawled back to her beloved menthol lights. Smoking had become a metaphorical chain around her neck, shackling her to an early death. Haunted by a nightmarish vision of her future — her son at her deathbed, begging her not to leave him — Hansen devised a drastic quit method. She bought a 72-foot length of chain that was unwieldy as a corpse and locked herself to a radiator in her dining room. What followed: seven days of cold-turkey misery, comic absurdity, and revelation as Hansen stepped from behind her wall of smoke to face her addiction to nicotine — and some painful truths. Clanking around her house like Marley's ghost, white-knuckling cravings, and struggling to understand tobacco's unyielding grip on her, Hansen confronted her life in smoke: fractured relationships, lifelong battles with alcohol and depression, and a profound sense of emptiness. On day 1, the chain was her addiction to nicotine, each link a story about cigarettes and self-loathing. By day 7, it had revealed its ringing, rattling truth — that every smoker has a story, and it always centers on clinging to a comfort that can kill you. In the end, Hansen's story was painfully simple: She smoked to survive her life. And then, to save it, she quit. Fierce and funny, honest and utterly absorbing, A Life in Smoke is Julia Hansen's evocative and inspiring account of the extreme measures she took to quit smoking — decidedly not recommended by the medical profession. Review:"Creative similes...contribute to this compelling read, in which the drama of Hansen's life far outweighs the drama of being chained up." Library Journal
Review:"With minor forays into the history of smoking and the technology associated with it, this is largely highly wrought introspection." Kirkus Reviews
Book News Annotation:Hansen recounts her seven days of quitting smoking cold-turkey. Interspersed with thoughts and feelings at the time, are memories of her previous life as a smoker.
Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Book News Annotation:Hansen recounts her seven days of quitting smoking cold-turkey. Interspersed with thoughts and feelings at the time, are memories of her previous life as a smoker. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Synopsis:In an unsparingly honest and personal account, one woman recounts the extreme measures she took to crush her deadly addiction to cigarettes, creating a tour de force that is at once riveting, hilarious, and life-affirming.
About the AuthorJulia Hansen was born in 1963 in Vineland, New Jersey. She lives in Reading, Pennsylvania, with her husband and son.
Table of ContentsContents Prologue Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7 Epilogue Acknowledgments
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Health and Self-Help » Recovery and Addiction » Personal Stories
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