Hitch 22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens

For When: You're getting crucified

by Natalie Hope McDonald

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Published: Jun 16, 2010

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Noted writer and intellectual Christopher Hitchens delves into the private side of his public persona in a new memoir about perhaps his toughest subject yet. Known best as a political writer and avowed atheist, Hitchens offers up surprising revelations about the methods behind his madness as one of the world's most beloved and often hated scribes.

Hitch 22 flashes back often to the writer's early days of torment. Hitchens paints himself as a weakling in knickers, lousy at sports, who for most of his life struggles with his mother's suicide. Grief is later replaced with heavy drinking, debating and Hemingway-esque globe-trotting with close friends who include writers Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie. The high-energy memoir, while plenty self-indulgent, follows the writer as a young boy into manhood. It's peppered with a heady mix of boarding-school high jinks, quests for social justice and rigorous examinations of God, politics and America, all the while vividly recounting the "lacerating, howling" moments in his life where the "private and the political had intersected."

He also addresses controversy, like his support of the invasion of Iraq, and condemnation about how the war unfurled. He doesn't shy away from embarrassment, either, admitting regret for being an absent father. It's not quite what you'd expect to find on the pages he writes in Vanity Fair each month. But bold and brassy Hitchens characteristically treats himself as the subject he knows best.

Twelve, 424 pp., $26.99, June 2

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