8 1GT Tuesday September 15 2020 | the times

arts

Give him a

shot at the

Booker prize

Douglas Stuart’s debut novel is a

brilliant, brutal story of a Glasgow

childhood, says Robbie Millen

B

loody hell, if I’d had his

childhood, I would have

just curled into a ball

and given up. That was

my first thought after

I finished interviewing

Douglas Stuart.

Thankfully, he is made

of tougher stuff. He has taken the

trauma of his early years and turned it

into a book both beautiful and brutal.

His debut, Shuggie Bain, is the most

powerful on the longlist of this year’s

Booker prize and today he will find out

whether it will make the shortlist. If it

doesn’t, I’ll demand a recount.

Misery likes company, so let’s talk

about his childhood. Don’t worry, it’s

not just a story of gloom; it’s also a tale

of accomplishment. Stuart was born in

Sighthill, a large housing estate in

Glasgow, in 1976. His father walked

out when Stuart was four and died

when he was eight. He was “that

bastard down the road”, according to

his mother. He saw his father once

between the ages of four and eight.

He, and his older brother and sister,

were brought up by his mother. Yet as

Stuart puts it, “When I was 16 my

mother died. It wasn’t unexpected. She

died of her addiction.” His mother

was an alcoholic.

“From the age of four or five, alcohol

was just a fact of life for me,” he tells

me over Zoom; he is at home, in New

York’s East Village. “She was not

always drunk, but alcoholism was

always something she suffered from

and it worsened as I grew older. Some

days she might just be late picking you

up from school. Other days it would be

an absolute catastrophe. Bad for her,

terrifying for us.”

Along with his mother’s addiction

and his family’s poverty — Stuart

cannot remember his mother ever

working and they relied on benefits —

he had another burden to carry.

“When I was six, a gang of boys

turned to me in the classroom and

said, ‘Why are you such a little poof ?’

It stuck and that was my narrative for

the next ten years,” he says. Glasgow

in the 1980s was not a kind place for

gay children and he was bullied.

He was by his own admission a tired

and lonely adolescent. “All I wanted

was a friend, someone to talk to. At

the age of 17 I’d write these incredibly

long-winded romantic letters replying

to the personal ads. Mortifying now!”

All that grief and sadness and

misery has been turned into

something tough, tender and

beautifully sad, Shuggie Bain. “There

is nothing more healing than turning

trauma into art. The best therapy

for myself was to take all the trauma

of my childhood and write about

it,” Stuart says, though he is at pains

to point out that the book is fiction,

not memoir.

The novel, dedicated to his mother

(“I miss her every day, you always

have the grief”), tells the story of

Shuggie, a sensitive boy growing up in

Glasgow, from the ages of five to

fifteen. He lives with his mother,

Agnes. She is a defiant, beautiful

woman, but also an alcoholic with a

destructive taste in men. It is the story

of a boy, bullied and buffeted by

events, trying to grow up in a hostile

world, and the chronicle of the slow,

painful disintegration of

a woman. You root for both of them,

hoping that they find happiness.

It is also rich in a sense of place,

the gritty streets of Glasgow and

Lanarkshire. And the dialogue zings

with the rhythms of Scots slang.

Although dark, in its own way

it is a love story. “Shuggie is about

unconditional love truly because it is

about love that has been tested all the

time,” Stuart says. “It is a particular

kind of love that only children can

have for flawed parents, partly because

children never know anything else.

Children are such beautifully resilient,

accepting creatures because they deal

with what is in front of them, and they

don’t necessarily expect something

different. They just plough on.”

And Stuart, a socialist, also wanted

to give a voice to those who live at

rock-bottom. “I didn’t want it to be

a gawp at poverty or addiction. I

didn’t want to let the reader off with

some sort of poverty safari. I really

wanted them to be in the room with

Agnes, to see what it is like to live with

addiction,” he says.

I suspect that most of us would be

furious if we had been dealt his hand.

“I’m not angry at all. I wouldn’t want

Shuggie to be seen as an angry book.

It’s just life, and you don’t get a choice,”

he says in a soft Glaswegian burr.

Anyway, he credits his childhood

with giving him “a large amount of

self-reliance, determination. I’m

incredibly resilient and focused. I see

that a lot of my peers don’t have those

things — not knowing the keen edge

of need, the fear of having no safety

net. Those are the positive things of

the way I grew up.” He admits to still

having the habits of a poor person. “I

am incredibly frugal. I don’t waste any

money. I don’t buy anything on credit.”

Douglas Stuart,

the author of Shuggie

Bain, below

Thanks to that resilience — and the

help of others — he made something

with his life. At 16, he rented a room,

working on the tills at a supermarket,

while he finished his schooling. He

became the first from his family to

leave school with qualifications.

He had no particular interest in

textiles, but his teachers suggested

it as a trade that might suit a boy

with a creative bent. So first he

studied at the Scottish College of

Textiles in Galashiels in the Scottish

Borders. “One of the reasons why I

chose it was because the male-to-

female ratio was 15 women to every

man. I think after Glasgow, after the

bullying, I wanted this safe space.”

He describes his time there as

“incredibly healing because I had a

lot of support from female energy. I

think as a gay man, you have to

spend a lot of time dealing with the

self-loathing that other people

teach you to have.”

An MA in menswear design at the

Royal College of Art followed. “I didn’t

have a plan; it was all about survival,

about keeping going.” Then in 2000

he was spotted by a talent scout for

Calvin Klein. And it was off to New

York, where he still lives. Along the

way he has picked up a husband,

Michael Cary, a curator at the

Gagosian art gallery.

However, being a luxury designer

for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren

didn’t sit well with him. “I didn’t know

why I was so unhappy — I had the

career that all my peers in fashion

college were dreaming of. But I

couldn’t go into work every day and

create things that were out of reach

of the people I love.” He was from a

world where you feed 50 pence pieces

into the telly to make it work. So he

went to affordable Gap, becoming a

senior design director.

Yet he wanted to write; he describes

it as his “furloughed dream”. Which is

unexpected for a boy who “grew up in

a house with absolutely no books”.

He points out that “in working-class

communities books are seen as

feminine because they contain

I didn’t

want to let

the reader

off with

some sort

of p over ty

safari

thoughts and feelings. Having the

peace to read only came to me after

my mother’s death, after high school.

It takes a lot of peace inside yourself,

as well as your environment, to be able

to sink into a book.”

He says: “Writing was something

that my mother taught me to do.

One of the tricks, when my mum

was spiralling into drink, to distract

her and keep her safe and stop

her from stoating around town

at night, was to say, ‘How about

I write your memoir?’ ”

His mother was always fascinated

with Elizabeth Taylor, a star who led

a calamitous life, but was defiant in

not caring about the judgments of

others. “My mother thought of herself

as being similar so I used to sit down

and try to write her memoir, but we

never got past the dedication. It was

always the same: ‘To Elizabeth Taylor,

who thinks she does, but knows

nothing about the cruelties of love.’ ”

In 2008 he started writing. Unlike

most new novelists, he has never taken

a creative writing course. “Everything

I’ve done I’ve taught myself and took

my time,” he says. He describes the

writing process as being “incredibly

healing and personal”.

By chance, he met a woman who

used to work in publishing at a party.

“She looked cornered and wanted to

get away. I was all enthusiasm, and

she was all horror,” he says, laughing

about his naivety. Nonetheless she

read it and told him that he really did

have a book. That was in 2017. Three

years later it is published on both sides

of the Atlantic.

When he discovered in July that

he had been longlisted for the Booker,

he went “from being super-elated

to suddenly, ‘Oh God, what if I let

Scotland down?’ It’s part of my

national guilt, I suppose,” he says.

“Writing the book was finding my

way home and connecting two parts

of me. The boy I was and the man I

am are quite far apart. I wanted to tie

them together. I am always looking for

a way home to Scotland.” I hope today,

if the judges get it right, he gets there.

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Shuggie Bain by

Douglas Stuart is

published by Picador

CLIVE SMITH