Tale draws its breath from grip of habit

Words swirl with images to tell of a woman's smoking odyssey.

By Jen A. Miller, Special to the Times
Published August 26, 2007

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These Things Ain't Gonna Smoke Themselves
By Emily Flake
Bloomsbury, 112 pages, $12.95

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Emily Flake started smoking between her freshman and sophomore years of college. She wasn't rebelling, really.

"I returned to school with a full-fledged smoking habit and a vague notion that I seemed cooler. Tougher. More interesting. It was the start of a whole new me."

I can say she wrote those words, which she did. But Flake is an illustrator. She's the pen behind the Lulu Eightball comic strip, so along with her written turn to smoking is an image of Flake then (long hair, glasses, cutoffs over ripped tights) and now (cropped cut, drink and cigarette in hand) with the caption "Whole badass shtick not fooling anybody."

These Things Ain't Gonna Smoke Themselves is an illustrated history of Flake's divided relationship with her pack of smokes. "It doesn't say great things about me, but smoking has been a constant presence in my life for a long time - and I don't remember what I used to do - or how I used to be - without it," she writes. "Long drive without smoking? Unthinkable. Coffee with no cigarettes? Pointless. Working, but not smoking? Weird and wrong." And along with these words are illustrations of her doing all these things, trusty cigarette by her side.

Flake doesn't gloss over the risks; she obsesses. She dedicates a chapter to "Ol' Crispy Lung," drawing the chemicals that she knows are burning away her lungs. Her funniest pictures are what she thinks she'd be like without cigarettes: a slim uber health nut, obese because her appetite is no longer suppressed, or in a straitjacket.

It's the pictures that make this story. They match the bitterly funny dialogue, though you wouldn't need words to know how this story ends. Flake draws herself into a cagelike fence, shoulders hunched, eyebrows knit. You can guess whether her sidekick is with her, but you can bet she's not happy. Just look at her face.

Jen A. Miller writes for Poets & Writers, Psychology Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Pages and Paste.