Books |
These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves: A Love/Hate/Love/Hate /Love Letter to a Very Bad Habit
Emily Flake
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Memoir
They’re out there. Literally. The smokers, that is. In cold and wet and hot and horrible, you see them, huddled under canopies. Are they yearning to be free? Or do they love their addiction?
Forgive them. Cigarettes seem to be as addictive as heroin — but they’re still legal. And will be, as long as Big Tobacco can pay for lobbyists. The addicted smoker? She’s come a long way, baby, but she’s not going much further.
Even if cigarettes were illegal, Emily Flake wouldn’t care. She’s hard-core. She didn’t start out that way, of course, but once you’re hooked, you’re hooked. And, of course, she wants to stop. And can’t. So she goes through all the mental gymnastics that people go through when they are smarter than a chimp and yet toke deeply on cigarettes.
Why waste a rationalization? It can be a book. Not a big one — at 6.1 x 4.1 x 0.5 inches, “These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves” is just slightly larger than a king-sized pack of ultra-thins. And it’s not all words. It’s richly spiced with comic imagery and dialogue bubbles, for Ms Flake is not just a smoker, she’s the sardonic cartoonist whose “Lulu Eightball” appears in a bunch of alternative newspapers.
Ms. Flake is an ideal guide for this tortured journey. She came to the smoking party late — she was a nerd, in no danger of hanging with the cool kids. But “one day out of pure boredom, I finally gave it a shot.” And the waters parted and the promised land beckoned. I mean, it was all good.
In the back of her mind, she thought she’d quit at 29. The age was arbitrary. Once, as she was buying cigs, a lady said to her, “Quit when you’re 29,” and she said, “Yes, ma’am,” and that was it. She was then 21; eight years was “oceans of time.” But the days flew by like pages of a calendar in a 1930s movie, and, suddenly, there she was. 29. And wondering if that woman at the checkout counter was a gypsy, and if there was a curse involved somewhere.
Does this sound familiar? Not you, of course. But you surely have “a friend” who is trying to quit, wants to quit, talks about quitting, is not likely to quit any time soon.
Let me not misrepresent these 112 pages — they’re not just about Emily Flake’s battle to kick the habit. Nope, her interest here is panoramic. She starts with a brisk summary of the problem (“Maybe you smoke”), serves up an eight-page history of smoking in 20th century America (what, you wanted to read more about corporate pushers and ad industry enablers?) and only then flashes back to her story (“29 is not 20, when you feel indestructible, the notion of things like an unpleasant death far from your mind”).
The bulk of the book — if a book that weighs less than a hummingbird can be said to have volume — is about the mind game smokers play and the strategies they devise to quit. The reasoning — if we can give rationalization an upgrade and call it actual thought — is pretty tortured. For instance: “As I understand it, it also gives you cancer.”
Give Emily Flake credit for fairness. There is a case to be made for cigarettes, and we all know it: Cigarettes don’t kill people, people kill themselves. Well, she doesn’t take that easy route. She reaches for the intellectual rationale: “Smoking gives you a minute to step back and think about your work, to breathe (ironically) deeper than you do normally, it gives you a focal point. Having to choose between productivity and health is a problem, man, I tell you.”
On the evidence here, Emily Flake is Ms. Productivity.
You want to know: Yes, but at the end, does she kick? No spoilers here. But if you happen to see Ms. Flake outside an office building in the rain, I fear she may have something in her hand. As she’s said: “You can’t just go out there and breathe for 10 minutes. If you’re not smoking, it’s called ‘loitering.’”
Ms. Flake is exceptionally smart and sane. And so funny that smokers could almost forgive her for writing and illustrating this little book. Who will benefit from it? A friend who likes to laugh — and just happens to smoke and want to stop. Or a friend who smokes and wants to stop and you’re so sick of hearing about it that you pray for the friendship to end. Or just “a friend.”
To buy “These Things Ain’t Gonna Smoke Themselves: A Love/Hate/Love/Hate/Love Letter to a Very Bad Habit” from Amazon.com, click here.
To visit Emily Flake’s web site, click here.
