Picks and Pans Review: 'A Life in Smoke'

By Julia Hansen

REVIEWED BY JOSH EMMONS

MEMOIR

“I wanted to quit, but I didn’t want to stop smoking,” Hansen writes in her wry memoir about the demon weed. Nevertheless, she did, after desperate measures that included attaching herself by a 72-foot chain to a radiator for seven days in a bid to go cold turkey. A recovering alcoholic, Hansen takes an unsparing look at her life, work (including a stint as a Playgirl editor) and addictions, concluding that from her first cigarette at the age of 19, nicotine helped soften her belief that she was unlovable. She is gutsy, and readers on both sides of the no-smoking sign will applaud her.

Updated by ALLISON LYNN