Indeed, Hitchens’s style in person and in print is tailor-made for the memoir form. I was often reminded of that experience, minus the noxious tobacco fumes, while reading his memoir, Hitch-22. Hitchens spoke extemporaneously on a dizzying array of topics, from the evils of religion to the necessity of reading George Orwell to the benefits of grain spirits, punctuating important points with blasts of exhaled cigarette smoke. I had recently quit my longtime corporate-suit job in the Midwest and moved to Manhattan to go to grad school, and he was just coming onto the faculty as a visiting professor in my MA program in liberal studies. My first encounter with ‘Hitch’ was in the fall of 2000 when he gave an impromptu talk on the writer’s life in the Mechanics Conference Room at the New School for Social Research in New York City. I’ve been trying to figure out Christopher Hitchens for some ten years, now.
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