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I did the math: 153,000 cigarettes = two years of my life...
Free Press
November 2006
On Sale: November 7, 2006
304 pages
ISBN: 0743289587
EAN: 9780743289580
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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.
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