Anne Roiphe’s essay that appeared in Tablet yesterday, about her late husband’s smoking habit, moved me deeply. Its complete title, “My Husband Quit Smoking, Then He Started Again: And that was fine with me: He was a 20th-century Jew,” says most of what you need to know to “get it,” but there’s so much more substance to it than that.

I’m a bit biased, perhaps, because Roiphe’s daughter Emily Carter was an indulgent mentor to me when I was a 20-something writer almost finding my way. Last year, when writing about my own father not long after his death, I tried accounting for some of his flaws. In any kind of writing it always makes the characterization rounder, and therefore more moving, to include the unflattering bits. It gives you the reader/viewer a deeper bond to sympathize with the flaws and not just the virtues.

U.S. Marines, 1944.

If only we were so generous in real life. So often we witness other people’s bad habits and see in them nothing but evidence of their weakness of character. The obese person just can’t control himself the way we svelte people can. The substance abuser needs to get his shit together.

Just yesterday – same day, coincidentally – I was switching to an express train at Union Square, and an angry-looking guy gets off it smoking a cigarette down to its butt and, for good measure, drops it on the platform. I know, we should all be on board the public health campaign to stop smoking, but people have been smoking tobacco for a long time, and there should be someplace in public you can still sit and do it – though I suppose not the Q Train.

The portrait Anne creates of her husband, ten years after his death, is of a man whose demons were of his time and place, but who, all told, bore them with grace. If the American Jew who, at 18 and 19, smoked cigarettes from Normandy Beach to Dachau, can’t sneak a few puffs here and there, then who can?