Jacob Barnes
I'm very jealous of you being back in New York. I'm stuck here in London, where it's gray and very wintery. But I'm sure as much is true of New York.
Douglas Stuart
We actually have our first snow this morning!
Jacob
I can tell you that I've been excited for this for quite some time, so I’ve prepared a few questions, but I think the one we have to start with is a little conventional: what is the history of this book? From previous interviews, I understand this was something you wrote while you were designing at Banana Republic, writing during early mornings and late nights. But I can imagine that it is not as simple as just sitting down and deciding you're going to write a book.
Douglas
I was writing it actually not just at Banana Republic, but all my fashion jobs – the book took about 10 years to write. But actually, when I first sat down, I didn't think I was writing a book, or I wouldn't allow myself to have such a lofty dream. I just knew that I was writing and the book came out of me. When I started in 2008, the book arrived in these vignettes or cinematic scenes, almost as you now know them as chapters. And it all came out in a very nonchronological order. The first scene I wrote is Chapter 13, with the two brothers on the sea of slag, scrapping for copper, and, in the order I wrote it, I jumped to Chapter 22; then back to Chapter 3. And at first, I was just too anxious to admit that I was trying to write this book, so I broke it into small manageable pieces for myself, just writing these individual vignettes, thinking about characters in these specific moments. As it started to gain momentum, and I had a few of them done, I started to embroider around [the material I had].
In my mind, I certainly knew what was going to happen to Shuggie and Agnes; I just didn't know all the other characters that would influence the world around them. So I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, and when you're running a big corporate fashion brand, you travel an awful lot, so I was on a plane 14 times a year, a lot to the Far East, a lot to Europe, a lot to San Francisco. Whenever I went on a plane, I suddenly thought to myself, “Here are 14 hours when no one can reach me.” Through the power of accumulation, I ended up with a first draft that was 900 pages single-spaced; it was an absolute monster. From there, I just kept working through and refining, but the only person that ever read the book for a decade was my husband – I didn't show it to anyone else. That stems from the fact that I wasn’t writing for the notion that it ever had to be read by anyone else. I first of all just had a need to write.
Jacob
With that kind of industriousness, what is your background in writing? I understand it that your first short story that was published in the New Yorker [in 2020], but in other interviews, you’ve mentioned that your first writing assignment was taking notes for your mother’s memoir. What happened between those things?
Douglas
When writing my mother's memoir, I would never have known that 35 years later it would manifest into something that would win the Booker! [Writing the memoir] was just one of the many strategies that children who have addicted parents learn in order to cope – along with everything else you need to bend them to what you need them to do while not harming themselves. So one of the things I learned to do as a kid, in order to hold my mother's attention on me, was to say, “I'm going to write your memoir.” She must have set the first seed there – that's not something I came up with on my own – but it would become this game we would play together. I would just sit at her feet, I would take an old school book, and she would tell me stories while I wrote them down.
But I'd always wanted to be a writer, although growing up poor in Glasgow, my education was a riot. Because of my mother's addiction. I missed so much school, and then I was bullied for being gay, and so I willfully missed more school. There were a lot of kids who were coming to school without having their needs met, emotionally or financially, so school was really turbulent, and so I couldn't concentrate. It was only after my mother's death that I could actually read a book cover to cover; when I could find enough peace inside myself and in my environment, but it was too late, and I was 16 by that point. Still, my teachers were really encouraging: they saw a little boy, one for whom none of his other family had ever finished high school, never mind gone on to further education, trying to do something. I knew I had to finish high school because I was looking at the landscape, seeing that my brother and my sister couldn't find enough work after putting their faith into the heavy manual labor trades. I knew that I had to finish high school, so I went to go live by myself, and that's when I sort of came to books. I lived in a rented bedsit with other, older men, and I was going to high school every day. But it was still too late, and I was funneled into textiles, which took me to Galashiels, and then that took me to the Royal [College of Art]. And because I didn't really have a family behind me, I didn't have anything to hold me in place, so when Calvin Klein came to my degree show, and said “Do you want to work in New York?”, I would have said yes if they just said anywhere. 20 years later, I have a career here. So although I've only just been published this year, I have been writing for about 12 or 14 years for myself, and collecting quite a body of work. But I've been writing just for the pleasure of the craft. The desire was always to write and never really to publish, because I already had this engaging career that was fulfilling all the things my ego needed. But what it wasn't fulfilling was my desire to write.
Jacob
That makes a lot of sense – of the work that’s been published, a lot of it contains similar themes to Shuggie. Were you writing around these themes and the book became the biggest collection of that writing?
Douglas
I'm a writer that strives to go deeper rather than broader. I'm always writing about a sense of belonging, and loneliness, and isolation. I think those were just themes of my own adolescence. And even as a young man, I felt incredibly lonely and isolated. Part of that's the grief I suffered from the loss of my mother. Part of that is just being a queer kid in a working-class neighborhood. I think it's fair to say that I keep going back to love, to loss, to grief, to otherness, to belonging – even the second novel that I've just completed is about that, except it's very firmly a queer story. Shuggie is a queer character with a small Q, because there's so much else going on in his life; I wanted him to be as multifaceted. Also children don't have that inherent queerness because they're not aware of their own sexuality or their sexual needs. We leave Shuggie on the brink of manhood, where he's actually just beginning, right? I was left with a desire to go back for the second novel, and really look at a 15-year-old boy who is not Shuggie, who falls in love, and his love becomes divided across sectarian lines.
Jacob
You’ve brought up Shuggie [Bain] a few times now, so we might get into my specific questions about the novel: it’s written in this Glaswegian argot, which is a joy to read. But as a writer that was not otherwise published before this, was that device something you came to naturally? Was it a personal decision that you felt you needed in order to express the story; was that just your voice? Or was that something that you found in the editorial process to really embody the Glaswegian story at the heart of it?
Douglas
Because I didn’t know I was writing a book, I could do whatever I wanted. I wrote it in broad Glaswegian in service to the characters – during the entire writing of the book, I thought about it only through the gaze of the characters, exactly because I had no readers in mind. Part of that was naivete; as someone who'd never been published before, and I just wouldn't think about what would happen if someone read it. That allowed me to do what I wanted to, but also, broad Scots is, for me, always such an expressive and inventive language, and Glaswegian especially. And there's a poetry to it that I think I was also longing to put on the page because I am an immigrant, and I have been [in New York] and that has denied me my own natural tongue. A lot of the time I can go into a design studio and I wouldn’t be able to speak in Glaswegian because people wouldn’t understand you, and therefore your ideas aren't as effective as they could be; I've learned over the years to round out my own natural tongue in order to be effective professionally. Writing Shuggie was this space where I could just rejoice in the Scots language and in the Glaswegian dialect. I wouldn't even say on the scale of Scottish writing I'm at the far end of using dialect! [James] Kelman and [Irvine] Welsh are slightly further beyond me. But actually, when the book was finally purchased and brought through the editing process, there were a couple of places where I'd thought gone too far, and was ready to tidy it up into standard English, but my American editor said not to do that; that the power of this book is that it is what it is.
Jacob
On a small personal note, I grew up in Dublin, and I found the language – that broad Scots – to be really engaging; it kind of brought me back to a place that really did feel like home. Even from Ireland, I could hear the way people spoke from the writing. But I want to go back to what you said about Kelman and Welsh – even when you were not writing to be a “writer,” what was the interplay between being the “new” or “novice” writer and a larger literary tradition? Being the second Scottish writer to win the Booker, how did your writing intersect with a canon that draws upon similar themes?
Douglas
I didn't catalog myself as I was heading into it. But I am a huge reader of Scottish fiction, and queer fiction, and working-class fiction. I find that, if left to my own devices, that generally comprises the Venn diagram of things I like to read. As a result, I was aware of [the canon] – one of my favorite authors is actually Agnes Owens, who wrote a very quiet book – but I think one of the Scottish masterpieces – called Gentlemen of the West about a son who's unemployed and living with his mother…have you read it?
Jacob
I’m familiar with Agnes Owens, but I haven’t read the book.
Douglas
Anyways, the main character bounces between the pub on the corner to his mother's flat, but then fights with his mother. And then he fights with men in the pub. The book goes back and forth between these scenes. But that’s a book about a mother and a young man in a post-industrial landscape. There are all these other amazing writers, like Alasdair Gray, from Glasgow, for example. But I never felt that any of them covered what it meant to be a woman or a mother, or certainly what it was like to be queer. And that’s not to say that no Scottish writers have done it – there was a great anthology about queer Scottish fiction that came out a couple of years ago – but certainly none of the major writers ever did it, especially when considering this post-industrial landscape. So as I was writing the book, even as I was considering Margaret Thatcher, or the miners' strikes, I was thinking about this from a woman’s perspective – this is something that’s happening to them, they’re not on strikes, they’re not at the marches; that was very much a man’s work. And so I kept peeling; I kept pulling at that thread. This became looking at the same sort of thing that many people have written about before, but from the viewpoint of a single mother and a queer son, and I knew that was the voice that rounded out what was already there. But my entire world as a kid was women, because men didn't know what to do with me and boys shunned me, and my mother was a single mother who was othered by the community, because very Catholic communities or working-class communities don't like fallen women. They don't like fallible mothers, because they don't know what to do with them. We were just on our own. I understood Glasgow to be all about mothers and their young queer sons, and I hope that’s the layer I get to add to the canon.
Jacob
You mentioned that your own proclivities fall towards queer fiction and Scottish fiction and I was wondering how your work was shaped by other kinds of contemporaneous queer media that was coming out of the time, with New Queer Cinema of the early 90s, with [Derek] Jarman, [Gus] Van Sant. Reading your short stories, the scenes of these media crop of there as well, and I was wondering what the role of other media, and not just literature, played in this book.
Douglas
You grew up in Dublin, so you may have had a similar experience to me: my entire reading catalogue up until I was about 20 was foisted on me in the [school] syllabus. And because it came in syllabi, it was a lot of classics. It was a lot of Shakespeare, and then it was a lot of white middle-class Englishmen, like big, capital-C classics, and maybe a bit of Daphne du Maurier. I never got to see my own sort of people, whether it was working-class, or queer, or northern, on the page until I went out and sought them out for myself. Queer influences in the 80s and 90s were hard to come by as a working-class kid, first of all, and it would have been really dangerous to have moved towards it. Even things like Quentin Crisp, his book The Naked Civil Servant is one of my favorites. But it made me so nervous as a kid, because to be drawn towards these things was to reveal something about myself that I had spent my entire first 18 years on the planet concealing, just to survive. So you'll see [those references] in my later work, like maybe in the things I write in the New Yorker, as I'm influenced now by the queer culture of when I became a man, and could start to explore those things on my own.
Some of that culture has become huge to me, like the Jonathan Harvey play Beautiful Thing. And like you say, Derek Jarman, and things like Alan Hollinghurst. But when I started to intersect with queer books, and queer culture, whether it's EM Forster, or even James Baldwin, or Alan Hollinghurst again, they're not telling these stories from a working-class point of view. They often sexualize working-class men or working-class things, but they don't ever really tell it from that character's point of view; these are still incredibly middle-class or upper middle-class or very upper-class men who are going through the world and are oftentimes just using these other men, the people from my class, as a thing of sexual desire. So I still feel isolated, right? I still don't see really strong, working-class young men writing this kind of sexual work. That's why Beautiful Thing means a lot to me, because it's these two boys on a housing estate that fall in love. It's only very recently that we've started to see literature and film and even media in the UK start to diversify in a meaningful way, whether that's gender, or race, or class. That's why, to me, for Shuggie to win is quite important – certainly from my childhood, nothing ever felt like it was coming from the core of my entire experience.
Jacob
How are you relating to the public conception of the book? Even though you’ve often said that this isn’t a book about suffering, as the book grows bigger for audiences that may not be familiar with the specifically British or Scottish context, it becomes a story of suffering. Under public scrutiny, have you reevaluated the story, or does it remain the same in your head, and people can take from it what they like?
Douglas
Exactly what you said at the end. When people talk about it being a book about suffering, it's because they're bringing their own lenses to it, and I can't control those lenses. For a kid that grows up like Shuggie, he isn't aware of that suffering, these are just the people he loves and the environment he's in. It’s only when you become an adult and you can look across the landscape, you think, “Oh, maybe that wasn't as great as it could have been,” or “Not everybody grew up like that.” The book for me has always been about love, and for me to say this is a book about suffering would be for me to abandon my characters in the middle of the room, and then step back with media and critics and everybody else and be like, “Yep, that's what it is.” It's not; I stand with my characters, and that is the autobiographical nature of [the book]. It's always been about love and connection, but not necessarily always a sweet love. There's two sort of types of love in the book: the first one is that tenacious, very hopeful, old, forgiving love that children can have for parents, for flawed parents especially. No one will love you like your child will. And then there's Agnes’ search for love, right? All Agnes is looking for in this book is actual, true love and a bit of glamour, and a bit of self-worth and, and it just keeps being denied. Then there's just the Glaswegian spirit of compassion and humanity. Even in tough times, the Glaswegian spirit is to look at it with bluntness, and when you don't have the comfort of money, really opposing things sit together: you have incredible violence with tenderness. You have sadness with humor. You want to cram the book full with as much humanity as you can, but it is about love.
Jacob
This kind of love you’re writing about, that's not always beautiful love or tender love maybe; it’s a little reminiscent of Raymond Carver's, in that it cuts to the core of how we actually feel, not the way that we like to compose our feelings on the page. I think Shuggie does a very good job of that. But with the media in mind, how are you coping with your newfound celebrity?
Douglas
Yeah, thanks for asking that; actually, nobody's asked me how I'm coping. [2020 was] a weird year. One of the things that's been strange is that it’s all happened through this tiny pinprick of a lens; even meeting you today. In a lot of ways that, that makes me incredibly sad, because I think now that the book is in the world, all I want is human connection; to connect readers and to have a conversation. The greatest thing about writing a book is giving these characters to someone so they're no longer just yours. They've been mine for 12 years. I want Shuggie and Agnes to be somebody else's, and I want to have that relationship with the reader. I'm not able to do that now. I didn't meet the other finalists at the Booker. I didn't get to meet the judges properly. It's all happening this way. But I think that's also the benefit of it – I'm on my cell phone, on my own couch. Through this all, I'm always at home, so there's a little bit of balancing that happens there.
I've always had a funny relationship with books; I've always felt like they weren't always accessible to kids like me, or young men like me, and so I wrote Shuggie from a point of accessibility. I wanted it to be accessible for the characters first, and then for the people that love those characters and understand that world, or for working-class communities. So with all of this, that's still the point; it's all about accessibility for me. I just tried to be there and be grateful, and if anyone wants to talk, to be there to do that. You’re the first person to ask, does that answer the question?
Jacob
Yes, it does! I’d imagine you have a book tour for when this all blows over, right?
Douglas
Yeah, I mean, there was a book tour for all of [2020] but that all got wiped. But yes, there's a really big book tour and I'm looking forward to that. I think I've been waiting for this moment my entire life in a way; I put aside my fashion career in order to be present for this. I think one of the big losses of [2020] was that it hasn't been a full experience yet. I’m ready now.
Jacob
I can imagine that will be an entirely new lens; I would guess that, for better or worse, much of what you're getting comes through a screen or is mediated by press. I'm sure that meeting readers is going to be something entirely different.
Douglas
Yeah, it's going to be fascinating. I've actually only had one in-person reading, and that was at the very beginning. That was for the book launch. And then the pandemic hit the week after, and everything closed down. At that point, you're giving the book to people, you're not having a dialogue with them about it. It’ll be fascinating, and I hope I’m up to it!
Jacob
Well, best of luck.
Douglas
Now I'm just going sit and like stare into the middle distance and worry about that, Jacob, thanks for that!
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, Picador, £14.99, 978-1529019278
