A Life in Smoke: A Memoir

By Julia Hansen

"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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Free Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2006
• ISBN: 9781416542599

Julia Hansen

Julia Hansen was born in 1963 in Vineland, New Jersey. She lives in Reading, Pennsylvania, with her husband and son.

Book preview

Prologue

6:26 a.m.

I lean over John’s broad back to peer at the clock. Flopping back on my pillow, I pull the heavy quilt up to my chin and stare at the ceiling.

I am not ready for this. Who quits smoking on four hours of sleep?

Last night I’d wandered the house until 2:30 a.m., smoking cigarette after cigarette, trying to commit the act to memory. A taste: hot, a drought in the mouth. A smell: stale, like poverty. The way cigarette smoke ribbons, turns to cloud and drifts sullenly to the ceiling. I grieved the satisfying snap! of a lighter. The first stinging lungful of smoke over morning coffee or after a good meal. Scraping the ash from a lit cigarette to lay bare its hot glowing heart.

Having smoked almost a pack in the three hours before I went to bed, I was wired; nicotine triggers a rush of adrenaline into the blood. Adrenaline is the hormone of cokeheads, skydivers, women who lift cars off their children. So minutes after I settled between the sheets, my heart began to hurl itself against my chest like a guard dog against a chain-link fence. The palpitations had plagued me almost every night for two years, and each night I was sure my heart would explode as my husband snored peacefully beside me. In the past year, I’d developed sleep apnea, too, so all in all, I dreaded going to bed. I knew I would drift off, over and over, only to start awake, gasping for air like a fish on the end of a hook.

There’s no way I’m getting back to sleep. I shrug into my bathrobe and head downstairs. My pack of Basic Menthol Lights waits on the kitchen table. It holds one last cigarette, forlorn, bent. Any other morning, a fresh pack would have awaited me, neat and glossy in its cellophane wrapper. To me, a new pack of cigarettes is as pretty as a party invitation, to be opened with the same small thrill of pleasure.

I brew coffee, and then it’s time. The clock reads 6:32. The Last Cigarette is a momentous event. It deserves respect, even if it’s commemorated every other day. So I smoke with the solemnity of a pallbearer, paying my last respects to a beloved friend. I throw my mini-Bic into the trash, a gesture I’ve made more times than I care to admit, and a wave of sadness breaks over my head. When I think of living without cigarettes for the rest of my life, the world goes gray.

An executioner’s drum roll sounds in my head, crescendos, and I put my cigarette to death.

space

I smoked my first cigarette at age nineteen, in my freshman year of college. Why so late? I have no good answer. Though no weed fiend, my mother enjoyed the occasional Camel Light, and I’d spent high school eyeing the popular kids, fantasizing that, with the flick of a Bic, I could join their ranks of smoky cool. Perhaps, as a girl, I even sneaked a puff with friends, and turned green—I don’t recall. But that first retch-producing, eye-flooding Benson & Hedges Menthol Light 100 was worth waiting for. Smoking was perfect, one more billboard on the self-destructive road I traveled. I was drinking then, and cutting, and in comparison, smoking felt benign and even fun, another facet of my life to withhold from my parents.

During the summer of 1982, home on summer break, I hid my packs of Newport Lights and books of matches in the glove compartment of my VW Bug. I hadn’t yet started to use lighters. I became a true smoker when I stopped using matches—which feel flimsy and temporary and, in smokers, provoke a certain anxiety—and started to buy lighters, smooth and solid and dependable. To a smoker, hell is a cigarette and no fire.

Every Friday night that summer, I made the forty-five-minute drive from my parents’ home in Burlington, Connecticut—then a hick town, not the upper-class enclave it is now—to the Lit Club in Hartford, which booked punk bands on the weekends; it was the oasis in my suburban desert. I had discovered punk music in Washington, D.C., where I attended college, and its bellowing rage eased my surly self-consciousness.

I was interning for the rinky-dink local newspaper. All week, as I filed my stories and photographed scenes of summer revelry around the city, I thought about the drive to Hartford. On some level, it wasn’t the music that drew me. It was the trip itself. With every mile I put between me and my parents, the bigger and brighter and more me I became. The pack of Newports was a totem that conjured the embryonic self I’d so painfully cobbled together.

And yet, as the week wore on, the thought of that drive made my stomach clench. A nervous driver, I drove a matronly fifty miles an hour and could not bring myself to venture into the passing lane.

I was afraid behind the wheel—of what, I didn’t know. Fear was just a part of me, always had been, like the birthmark on my back, and the rage with which I covered it was a bandage too small for its wound. But my will to outrun my life—a life that was already too complicated—was stronger than my fear of rolling down the dark highway, alone, pursued by the silver stream of headlights in my rearview mirror.

Smoking helped me make that trip and the many others that mark the map of my life—alcoholism and recovery, failed relationships, marriage and divorce, the birth of my son. Cigarettes were my constant and unwavering companion on those dark, twisting roads. I’m still not sure whether I found them or they found me.

space

I’ve been locked up most of my life. First, I was shackled to my mother’s love, chains of sadness and anger and guilt. As I grew, the chains lengthened, rattling like Marley’s ghost, each new link forged in depression and vodka and razor blades and obscured by a haze of cigarette smoke. It took me years to discover that it was only my emptiness that I dragged behind me, so heavy it made me stagger.

Maybe that’s why in November 2003, when I chained myself in my Allentown, Pennsylvania, home for a week in a last, desperate attempt to quit smoking, the act felt strangely familiar, like a perfume you’ve smelled before or a person whose face you’ve forgotten but whom you once swore to love forever.

I was forty, with a beautiful seven-year-old son, a new husband I adored, and a successful career as a health editor at a large publishing house. A health editor. Who smoked. A decade ago, I’d found the irony amusing. As the years passed, however, I began to develop this sick feeling in my gut, an irrational certainty that I would die if I didn’t stop. But I couldn’t. Something inside me compelled me to keep lighting up, even when my eyes swelled and my lungs burned and my heart seemed ready to burst the muscle and bone that separated it from the outside world.

I wanted to quit, but I didn’t want to stop smoking.

Ambivalence is the addict’s root affliction. For five years before I finally quit, I bought nicotine patches but mostly didn’t use them. I’d open the box, toss the cassette tape and booklet into the trash, and put the patches on the kitchen counter, next to my ashtray. They languished there, like birthday cards that you mean to mail, but never do.

I’d tried to quit countless times, and succeeded twice. The first time was in February of 1996, when, newly married to my first husband, Matt, I discovered that I was pregnant. I lasted until Daniel was about a year old. I quit again, for eight months, in January of 2002, a few months after meeting John, my second husband.

After that were the countless miniquits, when I’d slap on a patch for two or three days until I crumbled. My failures first shamed and then hardened me; 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 multiplied the estimated number of cigarettes I’d smoked—a pack a day for twenty-one years, that’s 153,300—and did the math.

Two years of my life, up in smoke.

I continued to forfeit my days, seven minutes at a time. I smoked in the house and in the car, snuck out of Daniel’s third birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese’s, closing my eyes as the nicotine entered my bloodstream and lit up my brain like a Fourth of July sparkler. I puffed apologetically at his soccer games under other mothers’ accusing eyes.

I won’t say that I loved cigarettes more than my son, but I did love them more than I loved myself. From 1998 to 2001, the years that encompassed an affair, my divorce, and another doomed relationship, I smoked up to two packs a day. I wanted to care that I could die and leave Daniel motherless, but I didn’t. At least, not enough. When you’re consumed by self-hatred, there’s no room for anyone else. Not in any way that counts.

space

The Lockdown, as I call my voluntary house arrest, was a variation of an idea I’d given my mother in the summer of 2003, during one of our countless discussions about her weight. You should chain yourself to your computer, set up a webcam, have Dad bring you water and cottage cheese, and share your weight-loss journey in streaming video, I’d said. It’s a metaphor for your addiction to food. You’d get a million hits a day. Oprah would flip.

You’re nuts, my mother said, and that was that, or so I thought. But the idea stuck in my head with the stubbornness of an advertising jingle. Months later, on a balmy Friday night in October, John and I and his parents sped up Route 476 from Philly on our way back to Allentown after a night out. I sat in the back next to my mother-in-law, and the smoke from John’s father’s cigarette filled my throat like a gag. So what. His smoke or mine, in twenty years I’d be breathing through plastic tubing anyway. I tried to imagine one of my lung cells at the very moment of its cancerous mutation. Would I feel its first murderous division, the way some women feel the moment they conceive?

Then, from nowhere, a thought illuminated the inside of my skull, blazing with the kind of light reserved for celestial visitations. I blinked.

Yes, I said.

What, John said, eyes on the road.

I’m going to chain myself in the house for a week to quit smoking.

John Senior laughed. My husband said, You’re demented. Fair enough. But I was also desperate. The plan seemed like my last hope, and possessed a peculiar logic: If I couldn’t control my impulse to smoke on my own, I’d impose that control.

On Monday, I put in for a week’s vacation. Lockdown, a month away, began on Monday, November 17. The next Saturday, John and I went to Home Depot and bought a 72-foot length of chain—brushed-nickel finish, heavy steel, purchased off the roll at 69 cents per foot—and two small combination locks. We’d worked it all out. We’d use one lock to fasten the chain around my left ankle and snap the other to the radiator in the dining room. John would shackle me each morning before he left for work. I’d have the run of the first floor, my computer, and my cell phone. John would release me when he got home. (We decided against shackling me to the bed at night. I am a restless sleeper, and John said that the chain would rattle as I tossed and turned, keeping him awake.)

The chain was as unwieldy as a corpse. At Home Depot, when John gathered it up and heaved it on the scale, I noted its weight: forty pounds. But it was lighter than the weight of the habit I’d dragged behind me for twenty years.

My chain, to which I would be attached for up to eleven hours a day, was my addiction to nicotine. I could see it, hear it, hold it; it had heft and weight. Each link was a story, a story about cigarettes and me. Rasping across my wooden floors, its weight disabling my stride, the chain would narrate my life in smoke.

Day 1

6:33 a.m.

The end is quick—one defiant hiss as I pass the lit end under the tap. It dies like any other I’ve held under faucets, dropped into toilets, and inserted into half-empty cans of flat Diet Pepsi. After the murder there is the ritual disposal of the ashtray—this one the orphan saucer to a cracked teacup—and the sigh of relief and regret. The deed done, I head into the living room to watch CNN. The last cigarette has soured my stomach, but sweetened my mood. When John comes downstairs, showered and shaved, I can smile. Pausing at the couch for a kiss, he ambles into the kitchen, with me at his heels.

I take a seat and watch him work. Opening the refrigerator, he roots for a moment, then shuts the door with his elbow, cradling the carton of eggs, the butter and bacon, a wedge of Cheddar. John cooks breakfast every morning; he is Pennsylvania Dutch and needs his eggs and bacon. He’s a big man—5 feet 10, 240 pounds—and before we started dating he’d lost one hundred pounds, twice. He still struggles with his weight, and loves his bread and potatoes as much as I love my smokes.

As he cracks eggs into a bowl, I say, Don’t make me any. I’m not hungry. I had coffee and a cigarette. (Not a cigarette. The cigarette. The last one.)

He ignores me, keeps cracking. Hon. You have to eat. He whisks the eggs into froth, pours them, hissing, into our cast-iron frying pan, then drops bread into the toaster. You want bacon?

Sure. I sigh. He will nurture me into a size fourteen.

We eat in the living room in front of the TV news, as we do every morning. I wolf my food, as usual, but John eats the way his people do everything: slowly.

Finally, he lays down his fork and looks at me. Ready?

The chain lies in the corner in glinting disarray, one end already locked around the dining-room radiator. Gathering an armful, John drags it to the couch and searches for the free end, letting each heavy coil drop upon the last. Spooked by its clatter, my eleven-year-old cat, Frankie, crawls out from under the coffee table and skitters into the kitchen. I’m inclined to follow him.

John pats the coffee table. I sit and extend my left leg, a maid of honor accepting a garter. He kneels at my feet and, with the other lock, attaches the chain to my ankle with a firm quiet click. Suddenly, I am a chain gang of one. Where are my prison stripes? John is right: I am demented. But this is the only way.

John tugs gently on the chain, then sets me free again. You better wear socks. This—he rattles the chain—will hurt in a few hours. I head upstairs, returning in socks but still wearing my bathrobe. I see no reason to get dressed.

John reshackles me, then checks the time on the VCR: 7:24. I’ve got to go. John maintains and repairs machinery in a plant that makes car seats and high chairs, and has an hour’s drive ahead of him. Stepping over the puddle of chain, he gathers his gym bag and keys and picks up the bag of trash I’ve placed at the door.

I lower my head, blinking back tears. It’s my first day of kindergarten and my mother has just walked out the door. How will I survive this day, my life, without cigarettes? Without my trusty pack I don’t exist, like that falling tree in the forest that no one hears.

I clank to the front door with him. We murmur the usual endearments, kiss, and then he’s down the front steps. At the Jetta, he turns.

You’re okay with this? You’re sure?

Yes, yes, I’ll be fine. Go. What else can I say? My husband has chained me inside my house, because I’ve asked him to, and now he’s got to go.

I’ll call you later. He gets in, pulls away from the curb, and is gone.

I shut the door gently, rattle back to the couch, and wait to go crazy.

space

For the first three years of my life, it was my mother and grandmother and me. We lived in my grandmother’s little brick house on New Pear Street in Vineland, a small city in southern New Jersey populated by the working-class Italians and blacks who worked in its many factories. On the outskirts of the city was farm country. In August, tomatoes and corn burst from the fertile earth; peaches, swollen with juice, dropped from the trees.

My grandmother’s woodsy backyard abuts a house with stables. The horses press against her split-rail fence; she lifts me high, my legs dangling, my dress riding up, so I can pat their velvety muzzles. It is late spring; I love the heavy clusters of lilacs, with their dew-silvered leaves and distinctive scent of honey and rain. I close my eyes and inhale.

There was Elisa, my mother; Julia, my grandmother, the woman for whom I was named; and me. My father, Nicholas, was just gone. Both eighteen, they’d met waiting tables at a Chinese restaurant in Atlantic City, and he had gotten her pregnant under the boardwalk. Weeping, my mother confessed to my grandmother, who promptly flew at her daughter, slapping and screaming: Her putana of a daughter carried a bastard in her belly. Her brother—my uncle Art, four years older than my mother—cornered Nick, held both fists under his nose, and suggested that he marry her. Art had been my mother’s protector since kindergarten; small, pencil-wristed boys in his elementary school had paid him to act as their bodyguard. He fought anyone, anytime, for a buck or for free. And so, in November 1962, a justice of the peace in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, performed a quick, quiet ceremony attended only by Art.

My mother didn’t want to be married any more than Nick did, however, and they divorced several months before I was born. No real harm done; everyone eventually got what they wanted. My grandmother’s pride was restored: I had a last name. Nick got his freedom back. My mother got me, a shining bowl into which she could pour all her inchoate yearnings.

I got something, too: a ghost. Nick’s ghost—short, wiry, with black hair and olive skin, like mine, and small, delicate hands. It shadowed me everywhere. As a child, I could not understand the pain his desertion caused me; as an adolescent, I denied it. In time, it would consume me like a slow-growing cancer.

But that came later. When I was two, my mother enrolled in community college as an English major. During the day, she attended classes while my grandmother, a talented seamstress and a supervisor in a factory that made coats and uniforms for the army, terrorized the women who worked under her. Her next-door neighbor, Irma, watched me while they were gone. In 1965, this was day care. Each day, fat, kind Irma, in her faded housedresses and sturdy shoes, took me for walks and sang to me in lilting Italian. In the late afternoon, I played on her kitchen floor while she prepared dinner for her equally gentle husband, Jules. When my mother returned from her classes, we’d head outside to the swing set in our backyard, or I’d color in the kitchen as she cooked. Dinner, bath, my mother’s crooning in the dark, eventually, her warm body next to mine in our shared bed. We lived in a world without men, and were content.

space

All that changed when my mother met my stepfather.

He was tall, this Kurt Hansen, with a high forehead and pale blue eyes. Looking at photos of him during their courtship, I see what she must have seen: strength. Wide shoulders, the shoulders of a man who would make everything all right. He courted me along with my mother, but there was no way I would let him be my father, as my mother sometimes hinted. Perhaps, at three, I was dimly aware that I already had a father, and believed he would return to me one day. What would he think if he knocked on my door, bearing love and gifts, only to find me living with another man?

But my mother married Kurt anyway. Their union was a huge wave that deposited me, gasping, on an unfamiliar shore. My mother and I moved out of my grandmother’s house and into the furnished trailer he had purchased to accommodate his new family.

I was enraged as only a three-year-old can be. This man had taken me from my grandmother, the horses, my lilac tree, my beloved Irma. He had stolen my mother. As angry as I was with him, however, I reserved my fury for her. One morning soon after their marriage, she kissed him good-bye at the door of our trailer before he left for work. Suddenly, she screeched and clutched her lower leg, kicked blindly against the pain. There I was on the floor, scuttling away like a scorpion. I’d bitten her calf.

My brother was born a year later and named after his father. I can’t say I welcomed his arrival. Perceiving the three of them as a family, myself as an intruder, I was too proud to step inside their shimmering ring of love. I was

Reviews for A Life in Smoke

[cfebooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I bought this book two years ago after hearing the author interviewed on NPR. I bought it to read someday, when I was ready to quit smoking. My readiness is questionable, but I started reading this book last night. I'll update this when (if!) I get to the other side.

[sara_k_14 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In A Life in Smoke: A Memoir Julie Hansen details her life around smokers and as a smoker. She examines what it means to be addicted and the pain deep inside that calls for the soothing that smoking can give her. Rather drastically, in order to quit smoking, she has herself chained to the radiator with a long chain for a week. Every morning her husband locks her to the long chain and leaves her alone with her thoughts, household chores, and daytime tv.It's a hard, desperate story.