Chasing Celebrity

Just after his 31st birthday, Hal Niedzviecki had an epiphany facilitated by Hallmark. It was no doubt the first of its kind for a guy whose life hadn’t been a typically Hallmark affair to that point. He’d been a rebellious teenager (drinking, staying out late, “borrowing” his parents’ credit cards and failing classes). He’d gone on to become a writer. He founded a ’zine called Broken Pencil devoted to alternative and underground culture. He wrote challenging, edgy books that were well received but pointedly outside the mainstream (most recently the novel Ditch, which Kevin Bolger described in The Globe and Mail as“bravely original and skillfully executed” but also “creepy, sickening and possibly even downright offensive”). In short, Niedzviecki at three decades was a committed nonconformist. An individual. And, as you might expect, he would not have wished to be any other way.

Then he turned 30 and his long-supportive, liberal-minded...