10 saturday review Saturday April 9 2022 | the timesgrowing up as a gay boy in the hyper-
aggressive culture of Stuart’s youth. “For
me, masculinity has always terrified me.
Growing up queer, I was... othered really
young. I internalised all my bullying. I tried
my hardest to fit in with all the other boys,
kissed a lot of girls, further than kissing.
I got into fights.”
It’s hard to tally the gentle man on my
screen with the brutal violence he de-
scribes in Young Mungo. “I would be the
guy at the back,” he explains. “So I would
get a participation medal but I would
never actually be involved. I’ve been hit
by men more than I’ve hit. I don’t have an
innate violence inside me, but I was always
trying to find that point of manning up.”
Another theme central to Young Mungo
is nature — the novel’s hero becoming
aware of Scotland’s extraordinary land-
scapes only in his late teens, a reflection of
Stuart’s own experience. “When I came to
London, people would say, ‘Oh, my God, I
love Scotland. I love the Isle of Lewis, I love
Loch Ness,’ and for much of my young life
I hadn’t seen any of these places. I tried to
capture that with Mungo, the psychology
of not even having the right shoes. You just
show up in the wilderness in your trainers.”
Though, like Mungo, Stuart didn’t even
know parts of his own city as a youth. “I
didn’t know the West End of Glasgow until
I was 19. When I went to college, about
100 miles away from Glasgow, the girls I
was at college with would say things like,
‘Oh, I love hanging out there,’ and ‘There’s
a great bar [or restaurant] there,’ and then
I actually started to feel really jealous.”
The mention of food reminds me of
how well Stuart writes about the terrible
cuisine of his youth — the deep-fried
pizza, the chocolate, the margarine sand-
wiches with sugar. “Oh, delicious! For me,S
ome reviews of Douglas
Stuart’s second novel, Young
Mungo, have featured the
complaint that it is too
similar to his blockbuster
debut, Shuggie Bain. And
while there’s no denying that
the core themes — neglect, homophobia,
domestic abuse — are familiar and that, as
with Shuggie Bain, the central character is
the gay son of an alcoholic Glaswegian
single mother, I don’t see the problem.
It’s not as if the violent, sectarian world of
Glasgow’s housing estates is over-repre-
sented in literature. And it’s not as if the
world of Shuggie Bain, which won the
Booker prize and has sold more than
1.5 million copies across the planet, is any-
thing other than totally compelling.
For what it’s worth, I think Young Mungo
is even better than Shuggie Bain: the narra-
tive is tighter, and Mungo’s struggle to
nurture adolescent love in a place of idle
violence takes the reader to new places.
“It’s funny you say that because, of course,
with Shuggie, I was learning my craft,” says
Stuart, 45, speaking to me from the small
Manhattan apartment he shares with his
art curator husband. On the wall behind
him is a Victorian map of Glasgow depict-
ing the city before the introduction of the
modern housing schemes of his childhood.
“I didn’t study English literature. We didn’t
have books at home. I didn’t have a circle
of writer friends. I took ten years to teach
myself how to write and develop my voice.
But with Young Mungo I came into it with
a very clear plan.”
The biographical details are helpful. It’s
important to remember with Stuart that
this is a man who was orphaned at 16 and
ended up living in a bedsit on his own
when his beloved mother succumbed to
alcoholism. Who still managed to get to
university to study fashion at the Royal
College of Art, then to make it to the
highest levels of the fashion industry in
New York. Who had no formal education
in literature, who encountered his first
novel when he was 17 (Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the d’Urbervilles), whose first novel
was rejected 44 times, but who neverthe-
less went on to win one of the biggest
literary prizes on the planet.
What does his family make of his wild
success? “My sister still lives on the streets
that I write about,” says Stuart, the young-
est of three siblings (his brother died
when Stuart was 21). “They’re dead proud.
Though I think sometimes success in
literary circles doesn’t necessarily touch
the community I’m from. I called my sister
the night that I won the Booker and she
said, ‘Oh, that’s great.’ Then she went, ‘You
know, I tried to return a top to Primark
today and they wouldn’t take it back
because I forgot the receipt.’ It keeps you
humble, right?”
It can also be lonely. And loneliness is
the overriding theme of our conversation.
Stuart talks about the formative loneliness
of his childhood. “I was concealing so
much shame at being poor, at being queer,at having addiction at home, that although
I wasn’t writing I was always inventing
other realities for myself.”
The loneliness of higher education.
“One of the times I felt loneliest in my life
is when I went to university in my first year
of fashion college, and of the 200 students,
199 of them could afford to live in the halls
of residence, and I was the only student
that couldn’t.”
The loneliness of the fashion industry.
“If you share your tragedy, sometimes it
can lessen your pain, but by the time you
enter the rarefied world of fashion, you’re
so far from where you started that you’ve
got to just crack on.”
The loneliness of being a writer while
working in fashion. “When I got my pub-
lishing deal, a bunch of my friends went for
dinner. None of them asked me what the
book was about, but every single one of
them asked me if I would design the cover.”
The ultimate loneliness of social mobil-
ity. “My desire was never to leave my class
or to leave Glasgow. It was just to build a
life. And it breaks my heart to think I could
only have access to literary circles by
ascending to the middle class and then
turning around and writing about my
upbringing.”
Even the love story at the heart of Young
Mungo, which has two boys falling for each
other across the sectarian divide, serves to
highlight the loneliness of Stuart’s adoles-
cence. “The story is not autobiographical.
In fact, it reflects a desire to have had a big
love, to just see this other young man who
was going through the same things as me.
I would have loved falling in love at 15, 16,
to have met a kindred soul. But for me, it
probably didn’t come until I was about 19,
20, until I was at university.”
I cannot imagine what it was likeinterview
‘As a child, I hid so much shame’
the thing I love most is a salad cream sand-
wich. I love sausage rolls, I love a good
curry, I love everything that’s very Glas-
wegian. I do love a deep-fried Mars bar as
well.” His books bear witness to the conse-
quences of this diet: poor health and terri-
ble teeth, with some characters sporting
dentures as young adults.
“I have pretty terrible teeth,” he proffers.
“My older brother had all his teeth taken
out when he was a teenager and replaced
by dentures; I escaped it, but it’s been about
restoring them my entire life. A lot of it
was also done to us by the professionals:
they just thought, ‘God, he’s never going
to take care of his teeth, so we’ll just give
him this really overdone treatment in
order to stem it,’ and that’s a class call.
That’s imperialism.”
Then there is alcohol addiction. An issue
Stuart could never, in my view, write too
much about because he is so perceptive on
it. “For me, drinking is incredibly nuanced
and it changes all the time. Even the things
that Mo-Maw and Agnes [the two mothers
in his two books] like to drink are really
different. Mo-Maw [in Young Mungo]
wants energy, commotion. She wants to be
having a good time and be buzzing with it,
and Agnes is very sad and turns to things
that really bring her down.”
Does he worry about inheriting the ill-
ness? “All the time. And I think one of the
things I learnt as a young man is that any-
one who does inherit it doesn’t predict it
for themselves. I try to be vigilant. I don’t
have a drink problem; I don’t have a natu-
ral taste for alcohol, but I worry about it.
I worry about addiction in lots of ways.”
These are, of course, universal concerns,
and it’s no surprise that his work, although
being based so specifically in Glasgow, has
resonated across the world. The thing
Stuart cites as the highlight of his Booker
year is not the prize money, nor meeting
Nicola Sturgeon and the Duchess of Corn-
wall, nor the mural inspired by the book
being unveiled in the city where much of
the book is set, but talking to high school
students in an inner-city district of Pitts-
burgh who related to the book. “One of the
greatest moments of my career. Because
that’s what books do, they connect us.”
Does he wish he had come to writing
sooner? A teacher famously discouraged
him from studying literature as a teenager.
“I enjoyed my time in fashion. I would like
my life to work out exactly as it has. The
journey’s been fun.”
As for parenting himself, he thinks he
has missed the window: he fancied it once,
but sees fathers in their fifties and they
look “knackered”. Instead, he intends to
focus on his writing career, having gone
full-time only in 2018. At the moment this
takes the form of working on the screen-
play for Shuggie Bain (“I was a bit daunted
at first, but it’s making me a better writer”),
gearing up to embark on his first proper
book tour (“I feel like I’ve got so much to
catch up on — because of the pandemic
I’ve never been able to have a conversation
with readers, really”) and then, as of June,
having a proper crack at book three, which
will give some critics what they want — a
departure. It won’t be set in his home city.
“We’re broadening our world. I wonder
when I’ll come back to Glasgow as a writer.
I think I will. I think even when I write
about New York, Glasgow’s there, because
it’s how I view humanity.”
Young Mungo is published by Picador
on Thursday at £16.99Douglas Stuart tells
Sathnam Sanghera
about his loneliness
growing up as the gay
son of an alcoholic
tough tales Douglas
Stuart, author of Booker
winner Shuggie BainSARAH BLESENERIt breaks
my he ar t
to think I
could only
have access
to literary
circles by
ascending
to the
middle class