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AA working-class boy from Glasgow, one of the ways Douglas Stuart learned to cope with his alcoholic mother’s mood swings was by pretending to write his memoirs. They never got very far, but it always started with the dedication: “To Elizabeth Taylor, who knows nothing about love”. And so the seeds were sown for his debut novel Shuggie Bain, which this week received the Booker Award.
“I never thought, using that trick 40 years ago, I’d be here talking to you about my book,” says the author in a Zoom call from New York, where he has lived for the past 20 years. Instead of the usual smart dinner at London’s Guildhall (Barack Obama appeared at the virtual ceremony), Stuart is tucking up a plate of ham and cheese her husband made for him. Could have a glass of celebratory champagne later. “All these wonderful things keep happening and I’ve never left the sofa,” he says of life in isolation.
He is “blown away” by his victory, beating acclaimed authors including Maaza Mengiste for his epic novel The Shadow King and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body. There has been a lot of talk about the diversity of this year’s shortlist. As Stuart points out, Shuggie Bain is “a different novel”, his victory “a great thing for the Scottish voices, for the queer voices, for the voices of the working class”. He is only the second Scotsman to win the Booker, after James Kelman for How Late It Was, How Late in 1994, which sits on the bookcase behind him in his posh East Village apartment, a world away from the housing estates he is in. grown up. up.
The novel took him 10 years to write and was rejected by 32 publishers. The American publisher to whom he first sent the manuscript was concerned about finding readers for a book on 1980s Scotland. “Nobody here had any idea what Thatcher was doing,” he says. “We are watching The Crown right now and Margaret Thatcher and the government are feeling very outspoken and powerful people who are making things happen.”
Like Shuggie, Stuart’s mother died of alcoholism when she was 16, but he takes pains to point out that it’s a work of fiction: “It pales and eclipses what any seven-year-old could go through.” Poverty, misogyny, homophobia, addiction and sectarianism are all affected but above all, this is a love story between a mother and her child. “It is about unconditional love felt, that sort of daily renewal of hope that only children can have for imperfect parents,” he says.
Both Shuggie and his mother Agnes are strangers. “Agnes because women were not allowed to be anything other than what the community said they should be. And Shuggie because he’s a queer young boy, he’s effeminate and men don’t know what to do with him, ”explains Stuart. “They are a little abandoned and they cling to each other against this city that is going through a really difficult time.”
This is the age of endless crates and cigarettes, of closed mines and “men rotting in the sofa”, of women trading Valium, vodka and daily brutality. “You can’t set a book in 1980s Glasgow and not touch politics,” he says. “It’s so intertwined with how people felt invisible and how they had no hope.” (Ken Loach sent him a letter from a fan.) But he didn’t want it to become a book “about miners’ strikes or a novel about shipbuilding a tin can.”
From Agnes Owens’ fiction to Kelman to Irvine Welsh, there is no shortage of male drug addicts and “adorable scoundrels” in Scottish literature. But Stuart wanted to write about the effects poverty has had on women and children, focusing on the tragedy of a single mother and her child. “When women are fallible and, of course, mothers are fallible, society is really hard on them,” she says.
Living in New York gave him the distance and clarity he needed to start writing. He wrote on the subway and on weekends and holidays, all the while working on a “very demanding job at a huge American fashion brand”. Her only reader was her husband, Michael Cary, Picasso specialist and editor of the Gagosian, whom she presented with a 900-page manuscript. And who she married after more than two decades together in a ceremony at New York City Hall the day she signed with US publisher Grove Atlantic.
“Growing up as the boy I was and now the man I am in New York, they feel like two very different people. And so, even though this is psychology on the back of a box of cornflakes, it was a good way for me to make sense of myself and stitch myself together, “he says.” I love the boy I was. It wasn’t always easy. , but I wanted to evoke that world. “He doesn’t apologize for the therapeutic nature of writing. “Narrative allows you to take control of a situation that you may not have control over in real life.” He never wanted to write a memoir. “On the west coast of Scotland, we are never allowed to think of ourselves as exceptional, never exceptionally large or exceptionally difficult,” he says. “And a memoir thinks there’s one exception worth sharing.”
He was perfectly aware that he was writing “safari into poverty” for a largely middle-class audience. “People like to come for a tour and then come back to worry about the oat milk,” he says. “I thought, ‘Well, if we do, you’ll come for a stay.’ We will watch a woman drinking. You will be in the room with these people to the extent that you leave the book with some sense of understanding. “
In his childhood home, the closest things to books were shelves of vinyl models of classic books that were actually video cases: “You would open it and there would be a Betamax,” he laughs. Books can be “a pretty dangerous thing” for some kids, he thinks, “because you have to be out there proving you’re tough. And they can be painful because you never see yourself in the pages. “He is grateful to two English teachers,” who just saw this guy who was struggling and said, ‘Here. Read this!’ “The first novel he remembers having read was Tess of d’Urbervilles when she was 17. “In a funny way, I wrote a Hardy novel just set in Glasgow,” she says. “How women are used by society.”
But he credits the system with saving him. “There was a social fabric, a social network” to catch him when he fell into the cracks. Unlike the older men in his family, who had been “sidelined by the professions in which they trusted,” he had access to education.
“I owe it all to Scotland,” he says. Fear and determination prompted him to finish high school while living alone in a hostel after his mother died. It took him to college where he studied textile design, before becoming a knitwear designer and then vice president of Banana Republic; a nice trip for a poor boy from Pollok. “There was no reverse gear,” he says. “There was nowhere to go back.” And now he has received one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world for his first novel.
He thought he had written a historical novel, but this year’s events have given the book a new urgency. “There is a whole chapter on free school meals and then in 2020 there are headlines about a sports star who has to tell the government to feed children in the midst of a pandemic,” he says of footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign.
She has already completed her second novel, a love story about two boys beyond the sectarian divide, again set in Glasgow, but a decade after Shuggie Bain. He is working on his third, which was born from a trip he made to the Outer Hebrides last year. “I always write about loneliness, belonging and love,” he says. “This is what brings me back to the page.”
He hopes to give up his daily job to become a full-time writer – something that will surely be easier now. His mother taught him to knit to keep him quiet, and it didn’t escape him that it sparked his interest in textiles and writing, “the two things that have been such an important part of my life.”
The best thing about the novel’s success, he says, is the way he connected with readers. “Both from Detroit and Innerleithen, when people say, ‘Ah, I’ve been through something like that.'” Tauma is something that thinks “we just don’t talk in society, which prevents so many people from getting help and feeling healthy. of mind. I’m glad Shuggie can do it. “
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