THE BLEAKS

A Toronto-based novelist’s memoir about the fallout that resulted from his unexpected entanglement with the Canadian justice system.

In 2007, a belligerent drug squad raided Illidge’s (Shakespeare for the E Generation: The Page, the Stage, the Digital Age, 2007, etc.) home after a nosy neighbor tipped off police to the presence of a possible marijuana "grow-op" in the house. The author soon learned that he and his two teenage sons, the younger of whom grew a few marijuana plants for personal use, were all under arrest for “trafficking in controlled substances.” Treated like hard-core criminals and subjected to everything from police interrogations to cavity searches, the trio soon found themselves in jail. Illidge’s own life soon began a downward spiral. He and his sons became wards of the friends and family members who posted bail for them and could no longer live together or communicate with each other. Illidge’s estranged wife demanded he clean and repair the house—from which he was banned by court order—and put it up for sale. “Hankering for [his] scalp,” she also began official divorce proceedings and claimed most of her husband’s assets as her own. Low on funds, without a stable job or place to live and slapped with hefty judgments that included money owed to the bankruptcy trustee of a con-artist brother, Illidge succumbed to “the family illness” of depression. But the pills he temporarily took to help his condition only made the chaos surrounding him seem even more surreal. In the end, he emerged from the ordeal divorced and nearly broke but far savvier about his personal frailties and the Canadian government’s seemingly perverse attitudes toward marijuana and the nature of criminality. As eye-opening as this book is, Illidge’s tendency to overdescribe situations and dwell on his misfortunes slows down the narrative and will prove irritating to some readers.

Therapeutic writing transmogrified—with mixed success—into a story about the ultimate urban nightmare.