After Shuggie Bain was published, Douglas Stuart prepared to pack in writing and go back to the day job. He’d spent 10 years on his debut novel, then it came out during a pandemic. “It was the first week of lockdown. I thought, ‘God, this is the end of my publishing career.’” Stuart couldn’t complain. It had received fabulous reviews, even if nobody was buying it, and he knew he could walk straight back into a top job in fashion.
Then Shuggie got nominated for the Booker prize and America’s National Book Award for Fiction. In fact, between 2020 and 2021, it was shortlisted for well over 20 major awards. Not bad for a book that had been rejected by more than 40 publishers. It went on to win the Booker, which inevitably boosted sales. But here was something different. A novel that had been considered inaccessible and unmarketable was selling by the shelfload in supermarkets. To date, it has sold more than 1.3m copies in the English language alone. This brutal love story about a young gay boy trying to protect his alcoholic mother from herself and the ravages of the world, partially written in the Scottish vernacular, had huge popular appeal. Perhaps even more remarkable, Stuart had not read a book for pleasure until he was 16.
We meet at a basement bar in the East Village in Lower Manhattan, where Stuart, 45, has lived for the past 21 years. Life couldn’t be more different from the high-rise blocks and tenements where he grew up in Glasgow. It’s here that he made a success of himself as a fashion designer for Calvin Klein and Banana Republic, here that he earned more money than he ever thought possible, and here that he married the man who has been his partner since he was 20. And yet it is Glasgow that continues to define him, not least in his second novel, Young Mungo, published later this month.
Stuart’s accent is still distinctly Scottish, but more refined than I’d expected – certainly more so than his characters, most of whom speak in a raw Glaswegian slang. Has America softened the accent? Possibly a little, he says, but the way he speaks is largely down to his mother. She was a proud woman who insisted that he spoke the Queen’s English. “She thought regional accents would hold back your kids; that if you wanted to do well you had to talk like a BBC newscaster. So as a kid I just sounded a bit weirder than the kids around me.”
Did they bully him for the way he spoke? He laughs. They hardly needed that as an excuse, he says. From the age of six, they taunted him. “They thought I was queer because I liked dolls, My Little Pony and singing and dancing, and if you gave me a bit of space I’d twirl. But actually the reason they thought I was gay is because I didn’t play football. Every day somebody would call me a poofy wee bastard. I didn’t quite know what they meant, but I knew I should feel ashamed about it.”
By this time, he was already the adult in the house – his sister and brother were 15 and 13 years older, and had left home. He would undress his mother when she was too drunk to do it herself, brush out the knots from her hair, make sure she was eating enough, get in bed to warm her up, try to protect her from abuse and gossip, and give her the love she was so desperately missing in her life. “The parent and child relationship from when I was about six was inverted totally. I had to miss school all the time. I had a really disrupted education.”
His father had left when Stuart was four; he saw him only twice after that. He was a serial philanderer, and his mother remained hopelessly in love with him. “One of my formative memories is of him leaving. That’s what escalated her drinking. In a way my father killed my mother. It just took 12 more years for her to die from her alcoholism.”
Stuart’s mother did any number of jobs to keep the family going – in a chip shop, petrol station, cleaning houses. Ultimately, it was the combination of addiction and searing unemployment under Margaret Thatcher that left the family dependent on benefits. In the early days, he says, she was such fun. “She wanted nothing more than to have a house full of friends and kids. She was really popular, which makes her disintegration harder to bear.” What did she drink? “Anything. If she had enough money, she drank vodka; if she didn’t, she’d drink fortified lager – Special Brew or Tennent’s. Nasty.”
His mother was beautiful, and however low she sank, she always looked immaculate – just like Shuggie’s mother, Agnes Bain. She so wanted the family to be cultured that she created an illusion of bookishness in their home. “We had shelves of books that looked like Henry James or Thomas Hardy. But they were just facades – like a Blockbuster video cover, except they were all burgundy leatherette or embossed plastic.”
Would he have been able to write Shuggie Bain if his mother had still been alive? “I don’t think I could have, because Shuggie is about loss and grief, so I wouldn’t have had the impetus. I didn’t just want to conjure up hardship and the pain of loving someone with addiction, but also the wonderful small things: her pride, her resilience, her dignity, her glamour. I wouldn’t have needed to have written it if my mother had still been alive.”
***
It was only after winning the Booker that Stuart started to think of himself as an author. “When I woke up the next day I thought, ‘That’s it.’ Until that point I’d been thinking, ‘I’ve got to go and get a job.’” Writing full-time has certainly paid off – Young Mungo has taken him only two years, and is every bit as good as Shuggie Bain. The novel follows schoolboys Mungo (named after the patron saint of Glasgow) and James as they fall in love in a macho environment where any hint of homosexuality is stamped out. Literally. (Mungo’s older brother Hamish outdoes Trainspotting’s Begbie on brutality.) A parallel story describes Mungo’s traumatic fishing trip with two older men. The astonishing thing is that, as with Shuggie Bain, despite the book being soaked in horror, it’s the tenderness that wins out in the end.
Stuart’s language is fantastically cinematic. We don’t read Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo so much as see them. He’ll sicken us with cruelty in one paragraph, move us to tears the next, have us belly-laughing by the end of the page. The books are emotional rollercoasters, just as his childhood was. “Sometimes I’d come home and my mum would be having a party, sometimes her head would be in the oven. Twelve years of living with an alcoholic, there were very few scenarios I didn’t see.” What did you do when her head was in the oven? “I just took it out and hoped she was all right. Suicide was always a huge worry. I often found she could be four different types of drunk in a night: fun, then really dangerous, then sad, then suddenly come to life like a revenant. It’s terrifying for a kid dealing with all those personalities. And sometimes she was fine.”
We finish our beers and head off to a nearby restaurant. Even on a cold, wet night, New York seems exotic. As a child, did he ever imagine living here? He smiles. “I was a kid who hadn’t even been to Edinburgh, so that would have been a strange concept for me.” He pauses. “It sounds like a piety, but I think of Glasgow as my home and New York is where I am and where I work.”
We get to the restaurant and it’s shut. Stuart looks peeved and slightly embarrassed. He says there’s another good place we can go to. As he talks, I make a note in my recorder that he’s stylishly dressed in an understated way – all black. “Navy blue,” he tells the recorder. “Douglas pays attention to these things.”
The second restaurant is also shut. “Fucking hell,” he says. “Now you’ve really stumped me. Let’s just have a bit of a walk.” So we wander around looking for food, trying to convince ourselves we’re not freezing.
By the time Stuart was 16, his mother was dead. Soon after, his aunt took him aside. “She asked how I was and I said, ‘I feel sad and lost.’ She said, ‘What you have to understand is, everybody’s got a sad story.’ What she was telling me was you have to pick yourself up and get on, because people are visited by tragedy all the time.”
After his mother’s death, Stuart got a job, moved into a bedsit, started reading prodigiously and put himself through college. “I was going there all day and working every night in Texas Homecare, straightening the aisles of paint.” Since his early teens he’d been aware he was gay (“Marti Pellow was my sexual awakening – I had a huge crush on him”). He told his brother and sister, and was shocked to find they were shocked. He’d assumed they knew. After all, the whole community had been telling him he was gay since he was six.
I ask if his brother is as hard as Young Mungo’s Hamish. “No, he was nothing like that. I was super-close to my brother. He died in a motorcycle accident when I was 21.”
Stuart was the first person in his family to complete school. He had wanted to do a degree in English, but his supportive head teacher suggested he would struggle because he had discovered his love of literature so recently. So he found himself the only boy to complete the degree course at the Scottish College of Textiles in Galashiels, a town in the borders. Money – or lack of it – meant he was still an outsider. He was the only student who couldn’t afford to live in the halls of residence. But for the first time in his life, he says, he felt relaxed in the company of others. “Going to an all-female textile college did huge things for my self-confidence. I felt safe, I wasn’t compared with other men, my sexuality was never questioned. I was just in this place where we were all laughing, creating textiles. It was a pretty sleepy, snoozy place. We’re knitting, weaving, embroidering, it’s not sexy, it’s not disco lights.” He loved it.
The college organised an exchange trip for him to Philadelphia, on which he met his future husband, Michael Cary, now an art curator for the Gagosian in New York. “The minute I met him, I fell in love.” Stuart describes the young Michael as “Kurt Cobain meets Morrissey”. He sounds so proud when he talks about him – almost boastful. “My husband is incredibly handsome, incredibly kind, polite, and has no hidden agenda. I felt very safe around him, very loved.” For four years they conducted a long-distance romance. Stuart returned to Galashiels, completed his degree, then did a master’s at the Royal College of Art in London.
We find an open restaurant and take a seat under a Covid canvas with heaters blazing overhead. “It’s like a tanning salon. I can have them turn it down,” he says.
At the age of 24, Stuart headed back to America, Michael and the fashion industry – starting as an assistant at Calvin Klein and ending up as vice-president of design at Kate Spade, establishing himself as a knitwear expert in the process. “When you’re younger and you start to climb the ranks, it feels really exciting. You have more money and nice holidays, but I got to a point where it was not scratching my creative itch. In fashion, so much is ephemeral. With these international brands you create stuff after stuff after stuff, but people don’t remember it. None of it felt as if it mattered.”
There was still something nagging away at him. He began to realise he had not dealt with his mother’s death. He had simply buried his grief – and his childhood along with it. “That’s what made me sit down at 32 and write a book, because I’ve never spoken about it.” He had not even told his husband what his childhood was really like. “He read the first draft and had no idea most of this stuff happened. Shuggie was a way for him to understand poverty, Thatcherism, addiction, because I had no other way to explain it to him.”
The wine waiter arrives. “I’ll take something red but not too jammy or sweet or sickly,” he says. “And is it possible to turn the heaters down a bit?” He points to his head. “I don’t want to upset other people, but this bald guy feels like he’s a crispy ham.” Our neighbours thank him – they’re boiling, too. Stuart is a mix of confident and assertive, apologetic and self-conscious.
***
When we speak it’s a month until Young Mungo is published and he is anxious. “I think there’s an enormous amount of pressure once you win the Booker with your debut: people are going to come to your work with a different critical lens, or begin to rebalance accounts, or see if you’ve really got the stuff. So you worry about that.”
But the diffidence soon disappears, eclipsed by his passion for his novel. “It’s about performative masculinity; young boys who are being asked to be violent, to be sexualised, to lower their expectations.” Young Mungo is set in a post-Thatcher wasteland of 1992, where older men are unemployed and emasculated, younger men see no point in trying to get a job so they sell drugs, and Catholic and Protestant kids throw bricks at each other as they vie for sectarian supremacy.
At the heart of the book is the relationship between Mungo and James. Stuart captures brilliantly the intensity, fumbling clumsiness and innocence of first love. Is this the relationship Stuart wanted as a teenager? “I would have loved it,” he says. But when he was growing up in 80s and 90s Glasgow, he says, there was no sense that this was a possibility.
The threat of physical and sexual abuse is omnipresent in the novel. I ask if he was sexually abused. “No, nothing like that ever happened to me.” As for physical violence, he wasn’t so lucky. When he was 16, he was assaulted by a group of teenagers. “There were about 12 of them. They started calling me ‘You fat poof’ and all this, and beat the shit out of me.” They only stopped when a car pulled up. “It was an old woman, a pensioner who stopped in a wee red car with her husband, and she stopped because they thought I was a dog because I was on the ground. My nose was bust, my eyes black. I was cut and bruised all over.”
He had never seen the boys before. They were just bored. Does he think they would have killed him if the car hadn’t stopped? “I don’t think they had the ability to stop. You just keep going cos you’re having fun and before you know it you’ve killed somebody or given them brain damage. I remember so vividly the guys taking turns running and jumping on my head and … bang. They were having a great time. After that I just stayed at home and did my homework. It ended my socialisation as a teenage kid because I was so terrified.”
Stuart has always suffered with anxiety and says the money raised from events to publicise Young Mungo is going to a mental health charity. How is his mental health these days? “Nice journalistic segue! I’m naturally anxious, and it’s an anxious time before pubishing a book, but generally I’m the happiest I have been. I feel I’m doing the work I was meant to be doing all my life.”
Stuart was initially reluctant to acknowledge the autobiographical nature of his work. He thought it might both undermine the fictional element and diminish his past. But now he embraces it. This is his territory, and he could happily mine it for the rest of his writing life. “These characters are very close to my heart. I’m writing about me. I think my entire life’s work will be about searching these wounds. I am fascinated by belonging and families when they disintegrate, about what it means to be young and queer and working class, what it means when you don’t belong in the only place you know. What I’m always writing about is gentleness in the face of oppression. Really, I’m only writing love stories.”
Actually, he says, his next novel is going to be totally different. “There is no brother or sister.” He pauses. “But there is an alcoholic mum.” He splutter-laughs.
We head off into the night. He walks me part-way to my hotel. I ask if he felt the need to escape Glasgow when he came here. “No. I loved Glasgow, but I’m not sure Glasgow loved me. New York gave me a sense of distance and clarity, but also made me incredibly homesick. I don’t know how you could leave your Glaswegian upbringing at the door. It’s not a mild place. It is a place with a real stamped definition, so wherever I go I am Glaswegian.”
As for New York, he says, it has changed. “When I first came it felt like a place where creatives from all over the world were coming to meet and express themselves and have fun. Now it feels like a rich person’s playground. I’m trying to find somewhere to live in Glasgow so I can spend time between both, because it’s a source of inspiration for me and I want to see my family more.”
How did they react when he won the Booker? “I think my sister is proud of the book, though the Booker doesn’t mean anything to her. I called her to say I’d won and she was like, ‘Oh, that’s good. You know I tried to return a top to Primark earlier on, and they wouldn’t take it because I forgot the receipt.’ It keeps you grounded.”
But two years on, busy writing the TV adaptation of Shuggie Bain, he knows just how big winning the Booker was. “It’s changed my life. It’s changed what I do for a living. Now I feel invited to be part of a literary conversation.” But what means more is the way it has changed his relationship with his home city.
He tells me about the mural on the side of the Barrowland Ballroom of Shuggie dancing, accompanied by a quote from his mother, Agnes: “You’ll not remember the city, you were too wee, but there’s dancing. All kinds of dancing.”
Stuart can’t contain his delight. “Considering Glasgow inspired every word in that book, that got me. That was tears, and nobody told me it was happening till the day it happened.” He takes out his phone and shows me a photograph of first minister Nicola Sturgeon putting the finishing touches to it. “When you think Glasgow has got a mural of Billy Connolly and St Mungo, and now they’ve also got one of Shuggie Bain. What could be fucking better?” He looks me in the eye fiercely. Proudly. “What could be better?”
• Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart is published on 14 April by Picador at £16.99. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Douglas Stuart is on tour throughout April.
