Interview with "Open book toronto" nov. 2014
(www.openbooktoronto.com)
"ON WRITING the bleaks" WITH PAUL ILLIDGE
Paul Illidge got the
surprise of a lifetime one summer night when police officers showed up at his
suburban home. It was a drug raid, and it ended with Paul and his sons in
handcuffs due to the marijuana plants in Paul's basement.
The years-long legal
nightmare that started that night is documented in Paul's memoir, The Bleaks (ECW
Press), which raises questions about police resources, medical use of
marijuana, the court system and family relationships.
Paul talks to Open Book
about how one of Trudeau's most famous quotes applies to his story, how his
children reacted to the book and Mary Karr's words on memoir that inspired him
while writing.
Open
Book:
How would you describe your
book, The Bleaks?
Paul Illidge:
It’s the first-hand account
of a violent police raid on my family home, and the often harrowing six-year
journey through the criminal justice system it sent one of my sons and me on.
It’s a book about overcoming trauma, coming to grips with depression and mental
illness; about letting go of the past and moving forward in what Bob Dylan
calls the “wild race” of life.
OB:
The treatment you describe
following your arrest is shocking to many readers. What was the biggest
surprise for you about the judicial process?
PI:
The ineptness with which
judges, court officials, police and lawyers conducted themselves. The complete
absence of impartiality, dignity, respect for civil and human rights. The
criminalization of the accused through insults, threats and intimidation, the
air of shabby, barely organized chaos that prevailed in courtrooms, rendering
the proceedings a mockery, if not an outright absurdist comedy at times.
OB:
Many people are of the
opinion that allocating police and court resources to prosecuting crimes around
marijuana is a waste, given its relatively benign effects. What would you like
to see as the legal status of marijuana and why?
PI:
With police
starting-salaries in the $90,000 range at the time of the raid on my house, I
calculated, while working on my book, that $2.2 million in annual salary was
represented by the number of police participating in the bust. When I included
the cost of police when we were in jail, judges, Crown attorneys, court
officials and the other personnel involved in prosecuting our case for six
months, the figure was close to $15 million in annual salaries. All for a
$3,000 government fine, and a $3,000 donation to a drug charity? I’d call that
a pretty significant waste. It’s a ridiculous price to pay in my opinion, even
if justice had been served. Which I contend it wasn’t.
The ethical basis of a law
in Western democracies is that it should do no harm. All the activities of the
police and the courts did nothing but harm to my children and me, grievous harm
physically, mentally, emotionally and financially. All our civil rights, and
many of our human rights were ignored as if they didn’t exist, or if they did,
they didn’t matter. In 1967 federal justice Pierre Trudeau passed the law
making homosexuality legal, the premise of the bill that it was a civil right.
“The state has no business
in the bedrooms of the nation,” he declared. I argue, in The Bleaks that it has no business in
any other room of the house either. If I want to grow some marijuana plants in
my house, I don’t need a government-approved license to do so. It’s simply none
of their business what I do in the privacy of my own home.
My view is that marijuana
should be legalized. Nothing would actually change very much. People would
continue buying their cannabis and using it recreationally or medicinally as
they are now. The “black market” politicians and police like to trot out in
their press releases, is a complete myth, one going back to Reefer Madness
days. Marijuana use is a self-regulating activity and always has been as far as
I see it.
Current estimates are that
twelve million Canadians use cannabis at least once a month — and that number
is growing. It’s not as big a deal as the media and Prime Minister Harper are
making out (for political gain in his case). He’s the only political leader
still fighting the War on Drugs, now that every other head of state in North
and South America (even Columbia) has moved on to other issues that are of more
relevance and practical importance in the lives of their citizens.
OB:
This is very much a family
story — did you discuss the writing process with your children, and if so, what
were their reactions?
PI:
My children knew I was
writing the memoir, but for them it was just another book that dad was working
on. My eldest son had graduated from university, was working in the television
industry and living on his own while I was doing The Bleaks. My daughter was away at
university in Montreal. My middle son and I continued to live and work
together. We never talked about the raid or the subsequent court case. There
was no point, as he saw it. His view of the whole thing was “Let’s just move
on.” And so we did.
OB:
Tell us a little bit about
your writing habits. Where do you write, and what do you need in order to
settle into a writing session in terms of food, music and other rituals?
PI:
I write every day, about
350 days a year, for seven or eight hours off and on, starting around noon. I
work in my bedroom on the second floor of the house where I live. I go for
late-afternoon strolls on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital at the foot
of my street: fifteen acres of well-tended lawns beside Lake Ontario, a bird
sanctuary and conservation area adjacent to it. There’s seldom anyone else
around (except the occasional hospital patient out with a supervisor having a
cigarette).
I sometimes think about
what I’m writing, though that usually leads to ruminating, questioning and
doubting whether things are really going the way I want them to. So I try to
focus on my breathing, on letting go of the urge to control what I’m doing too
much. I walk to a nearby Tim Horton’s for coffee, stop in at the grocery store,
come home and do the dishes or clean up the house.
I’ll listen to CBLT (the
CBC’s French station) in the morning, CIUT (University of Toronto) and the
comedy shows “The Debaters” and “This is That” on CBC Radio 2. I’ve usually got
five or six books that I’m reading at any one time. Philosophy, poetry,
fiction, drama, history, biography, literary criticism, cheesy commercial
thrillers, graphic novels. I like to keep my reading options open so it doesn’t
become routine.
The only thing routine
about my writing day is that I have a glass of cranberry juice and a cup of
Lapsang Souchong tea when I first wake up, as my literary idol Samuel Beckett
used to. Not every day, but frequently when I sit down at the computer to start
writing, I say a little mantra in homage to him taken from his novel Malone
Dies. “Live and invent,” he wrote. That’s what I try to do during my day.
OB:
Are you a frequent reader
of memoirs yourself? If so, what are some of your favourites?
PI:
I used four memoirs as
models/inspiration for The Bleaks: Chronicles
I by Bob Dylan, The Liar’s Club by Mary
Karr, The Tender Bar by J.R.
Moehringer, and Confessions of an
Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey. Dylan prompted me to be open and
free-wheeling, to not hold back but let things flow in my writing.
In Mary Karr I got an
inkling of how to keep my emotions in check writing about intimate, harrowing
and traumatic experiences. Since a memoir is true, one effectively relives them
as one goes along. You get pulled back into the anger, shame, guilt, fear, what
have you. I kept a quotation from Mary Karr on a Post-It note beside my desk
all the time I was writing my book: “The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with
could not be higher.”
From The Tender Bar I learned how to depict
myself, my children, my friends and everyone else I write about, in as true a
light as possible. Interestingly, in libraries memoirs are catalogued as
“entertaining non-fiction.” There’s a higher entertainment factor in memoirs,
probably because it’s the genre whose primary authors are politicians,
celebrities and sports figures. (Ironically, the author of The Tender Bar was the ghostwriter behind
Andre Agassi’s memoir Open). From
Moehringer I picked up some valuable insight on keeping your non-fiction
“entertaining” through tone and character development.
As The Bleaks deals with medicinal
marijuana, I went back to De Quincey’s Confessions
of an Opium Eater. De Quincey (1786 – 1840) suffered from debilitating “nervous
irritation and tædium vitæ,” what we now call depression. Alcohol (wine, beer,
spirits) only made it worse. Opium relieved excruciating physical pain,
brightened his bleak moods and made his life more livable.
It bothered him that “it
was lawful to drink wine without a medical certificate of qualification,” but a
jail-able offence if a person used opium without one. I posed this same
question regarding the use of marijuana in The
Bleaks, offering the opinion that in the 190 years since De Quincey
published his memoir, laws regarding the consumption of alcohol and drugs don’t
seem to have changed.
OB:
What are you working on
now?
PI:
I’m just
completing a new book, a short novel called The
Cloud Juggler, a mystery in the Georges Simenon vein. Simenon removed
everything from his stories but the essential details; stripped them of what he
called “ornamentation.” The novel is my take on his “roman dur,” the
psychological novel. The chief characters in The
Cloud Juggler are identical twin 20-year-old sisters, one who’s criminally
insane, one who’s not. It’s the first book in what I hope will become a
literary mystery series.
