Lighting Up: How I Stopped Smoking, Drinking, and Everything

Lighting Up: How I Stopped Smoking, Drinking, and Everything Else I Loved in Life Except Sex

In the critically acclaimed Five Men Who Broke My Heart, Manhattan journalist Susan Shapiro revisited five self-destructive romances. In her hilarious, illuminating new memoir, Lighting Up, she rejects five self-destructive substances. This difficult quest for clean living starts with Shapiroâ€™s shocking revelation that, at forty, her lengthiest, most emotionally satisfying relationship has been with cigarettes.

A two-pack-a-day smoker since the age of thirteen, Susan Shapiro quickly discovers that itâ€™s impossible to be a writer, a nonsmoker, sane, and slender in the same year. The last time she tried to quit, she gained twenty-three pounds, couldnâ€™t concentrate on work, and wanted to kill herself and her husband, Aaron, a TV comedy writer who hates her penchant for puffing away. Yet just as sheâ€™s about to choose her vice over her marriage vows, she stumbles upon a secret weapon.

Dr. Winters, â€œthe James Bond of psychotherapy,â€ is a brilliant but unorthodox addiction specialist, a
former chain-smoker himself. Working his weird magic on her psyche, he unravels the roots of her twenty-seven-year compulsion, the same dangerous dependency that has haunted her doctor father, her grandfather, and a pair of eccentric aunts from opposite sides of the family, along with Freud and nearly one in four Americans. Dr. Winters teaches her how to embrace suffering, then proclaims that her months of panic, depression, insecurity, vulnerability, and wild mood swings win her the award for â€œthe worst nicotine withdrawal in the history of the world.â€

Shapiro finally does kick the habitâ€“while losing weight and finding career and connubial blissâ€“only to discover that the second sheâ€™s let go of her long-term crutch, sheâ€™s already replaced it with another fixation. After banishing cigarettes, alcohol, dope, gum, and bread from her day-to-day existence, she conquers all her demons and survives deprivation overload. But relying religiously on Dr. Winters, she soon realizes that the only obsession she has left
to quit is him. . . .

Never has the battle to stem substance abuse been captured with such wit, sophisticated insight, and candor. Lighting Up is so compulsively readable, itâ€™s addictive.

From the Hardcover edition.

Country	USA
Brand	DELTA
Manufacturer	Random House Publishing Group
Binding	Paperback
PartNumber	0385338341_used
Color	White
IsAdultProduct
Height	8.5
Length	5.5
Weight	0.54895103238
Width	0.81
ReleaseDate	2005-12-27
NumberOfItems	1

Lighting Up: How I Stopped Smoking, Drinking, and Everything Else I Loved in Life Except Sex

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