Janet Malcolm & Smoking

 Another influence on her as a writer stemmed from her decision to give up smoking in 1978. She realized that she couldn’t write without cigarettes, so she avoided writing by immersing herself instead in researching and reporting. The result was a lengthy article called “The One-Way Mirror,” about family therapy.

“By the time she finished the long period of reporting,” Ms. Roiphe wrote in The Paris Review, “she found she could finally write without smoking, and she had also found her form.”