Everyone who holds a pen has a Christopher Hitchens story, apparently.

Here's mine:

Back in the late 1980s, when I was a 20-something unwed mother and an assistant editor at National Review, I debated Christopher Hitchens at the Yale Political Union.

The topic, as I recall, was South Africa.

Afterward, Hitchens invited me to join him and a gaggle of admiring Yale students, which, given the way conservatives were typically treated in academic settings, struck me as an unusually civilized gesture.

We got to talking about my work and my life, and I told him I was pro-life and -- as a result of having had a child out of wedlock -- pro-marriage as well.

He, at that time an unalloyed man of the left, avowed he had rather old-fashioned views on questions like abortion and not breaking up families with divorce.

Meanwhile, just a few years before the Berlin Wall came crashing down, the gaggle of Yalies questioned me self-importantly about why conservatives were so stupidly ignorant of the finer points of evolving Marxist theory.

"When you disagree with something at a more basic level," I replied, "addressing the finer point of emerging Marxist doctrines is not that interesting."

When I picked up "Hitch-22," Hitchens' memoir published in 2010, I discovered how he perhaps got those convictions.

He was a child of desertion, if not divorce -- doubly so, shockingly so.

As a mother, I could read only with horror what Hitchens wrote with a beloved son's tender compassion about the story of his mother's suicide.

Hitchens was his mother's darling. "If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it," she told his comparatively stolid father, and so this rather middle-class family sacrificed to send Hitchens to Oxford.

This same vivacious, colorful, committed mother (married to a man Hitchens described as the strong, silent and dull type) ran off to Athens with her clergyman lover, and successfully executed a suicide pact. Hitchens went off alone to recover her body.

As a woman, a more profound betrayal of a child -- even an adult child -- by a mother I cannot imagine. To commit suicide out of despair is one kind of abandonment. To commit suicide with a lover is the ultimate rejection.

This incident probably had nothing to do with Hitchens' intellectual convictions about God, but surely it explains at least in part the relentless energy he put into debunking religious claims of goodness. He was not just an atheist, but an "anti-theist."

Faith in God leads to evil and hypocrisy, in his view.

It reminds me, in these last few days before Christmas, about how important a witness our married life can be.

How can anyone believe we have access to an infinitely loving God if we, as Christians, do not appear any more capable than the rest of our broken society of restraining and uplifting our sexual selves -- of loving our families and keeping them together, until death to us part?

Christopher Hitchens, rest in peace.