Douglas Stuart on sexuality, sectarianism, life after the Booker and love

What, not even to get a table at a restaurant? Or to coax your husband to make you a cup of tea?

“Never, ever, ever,” he says, and then adds an extra “ever” for emphasis.

“I’ve never used that line …”

There is a pause. “I’ve thought about it a few times.”

He shakes his head. “A lot of people don’t read books and I would never want to be caught out by saying that and someone reply, ‘What’s the Booker?’

“I try sometimes with my husband, but he doesn’t have it.” He smiles. “It’s not given me much in my personal life.”

In his writing life, though, well that’s a different matter. Douglas Stuart, and yes, let’s be formal about it, Booker Prize winner (one of only two Scots to do so; the other was James Kelman in 1994), has found life transformed since his debut novel Shuggie Bain was published in 2020.

The story of a queer son and his alcoholic mother set in 1980s Glasgow, it took Stuart more than a decade to write, during which he supported himself with a high-flying career in fashion.

It then took just a year, starting with the book’s publication in the US at the start of 2020, to see said book change everything for him.

As well as winning the Booker, Shuggie Bain has sold more than a million copies to date and has helped him find an audience all around the world.

Artist Chelsea Frew pictured at work on a mural inspired by Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize winning novel Shuggie Bain on a wall of Glasgow’s celebrated Barrowland Ballroom

At the same time, its success has also been exposing for him, he admits, and that’s been difficult at times. So, he’s not sure quite how the success has changed things for him yet.

“Maybe I’m too close to it to process it,” Stuart says. “Maybe this is something I can answer in 10 years.”

What the book’s critical and commercial success has done is confirm that he is a writer. Stuart has now given up a career in fashion which has sustained him over the last couple of decades and next week he publishes his second novel, Young Mungo.

Again, it’s a book that explores love and poverty in late 20th-century Glasgow. Like Shuggie Bain, it’s a remarkable piece of writing; powerful, beautiful, remorseless and painful, full of love and poison, pity and terror. It’s a book about broken families, about sectarianism, about being a young gay man in a culture that is horrified by the very idea.

If nothing else, it’s proof that Stuart is not a one-hit wonder. Proof to himself as much as to anyone else, possibly.

“I think I was always feeling like a bit of an imposter when it comes to writing,” he admits.

Hopefully, that’s no longer the case.

Douglas Stuart, London, March 2022. Photograph Paul Stuart

That said, the success of Shuggie Bain does mean there is rather more expected of Young Mungo, he admits.

Before Shuggie, Stuart points out, “I was an unknown voice. No one had any expectations of me. Or any expectations they had were quite low. And now I think I have quite a high bar to live up to and keep delivering on.”

Musicians talk about the difficult second album syndrome, I tell him. Is it the same with books?

“Not for me. There’s a difficult third book syndrome,” he says.

Young Mungo, the title character of Stuart’s novel is a gay teenager living with a mother who is a drinker (when she is home at all, that is). He is looked after by his sister Jodie and comes under pressure to live up to the reputation of his violent brother Hamish. Much of that pressure is applied by Hamish himself (In a nod to Irvine Welsh, Stuart sums up Hamish by saying: “He’s Begbie”).

One strand of the book is pure horrorshow. A description of a fishing trip from hell, one that could have come straight out of the imagination of the late Wes Craven or Ti West.

The other half of the book is a story of first love as Mungo, a Protestant, falls for a young Catholic boy called James. A love that is threatened by the sectarianism and homophobia of the world they live in (embodied in Mungo’s brother).

It is, as Stuart says himself, a more propulsive, more plot-driven book than Shuggie Bain, though reading it, I vacillated between turning the pages in a fevered rush with moments when I didn’t want to turn the page at all, because I didn’t want to know what was coming next.

Young Mungo exists in the same world as Shuggie Bain. “I see it as a diptych and it might eventually become a triptych,” Stuart suggests.

“I believe a character in Young Mungo could pick up the phone and call a character in Shuggie Bain and they would know each other.”

So, it’s all a big Marvel crossover, Douglas? “And they have superpowers,” he agrees, “but maybe their superpowers are hope and resilience and love.”

Stuart speaks at the 2020 Booker Prize awards ceremony, at the Roundhouse in London

He lives with these characters, he says. “They feel very personal to me, they feel like people who really have lives. And I still talk to them today, even my Shuggie characters. I’m still intrigued by them.”

Perhaps that’s inevitable because this world he writes about in his novels was once his world. Stuart, who lives with his husband Michael, has been in New York for the best part of 22 years, but in his fiction he is constantly drawn back to the city of his birth.

Both Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo are works of fiction, but they take place in the Glasgow of Stuart’s youth and shadow his own story to some degree.

Both books are about motherless sons and that was what Stuart was, after his mother died when he was 16 (sometimes even before her death if she was drinking). Both novels are about working-class masculinity and the limitations of that when it came to sexuality. And that was also Stuart’s lived experience.

The last time we talked, when Shuggie Bain was published, I spoke to him about his mother’s addiction and the homophobic bullying he suffered as a young man. He told me about the time he was used as a jumping board by a group of young men for no reason other than the way he looked.

This time around the damage we talk about is psychological rather than physical. We find ourselves discussing tribalism and toxic masculinity in the Glasgow of his youth.

“I was forever being told to man up or to become something harder, something less sensitive than I was,” Stuart says now of his teenage years.

“Masculinity in the way it was portrayed around me really terrified me because I was so bad at performing it myself,” he admits.

“I grew up in the east end in a very tight community and, whether you were in school or on the street, how you were supposed to be as a boy, as a young man, was really proscribed and really tight.

“We were running in gangs or in young teams. We were expected to be violent before violence visited us. We were defending reputation; we were posturing all the time.

“And it just wasn’t me. I wasn’t interested in these things.”

But Stuart had to pretend to be. “In a way I became complicit in oppressing myself, right? I became my number one oppressor as a young queer man.

“I hid everything about myself, and I internalised all that bullying that had happened to me in my younger years and then spent my life trying not to be myself.

“The hours I spent kissing girls, Teddy, when I had no desire to do it. And trying to kick a ball and run with a gang. It just wasn’t in me, and I had so much hate for myself because I couldn’t fit in. And I was so fearful of being exposed.”

As the son of a single mother, he would often be sent to hang out with men, “any men,” he says, in the hope that their masculine influence would rub off on him.

“And sometimes that was old Jimmy building a shed a couple of houses along, sometimes it was somebody taking their weans to the canal, sometimes it was somebody had got a motorbike and you would go and spend time with that.

“And that fascinates me as an adult now. Thinking about all the men I was just entrusted round …

“And it was fine for me, right. Ultimately, it was fine. But we lived in this world where that was the right thing for boys to do and we know now in 2020 looking back – because we’ve come to terms with the Catholic church, we’ve come to terms with youth leaders, we’ve come to terms with radio DJs – we know that wasn’t always the safest place for a young man to be.”

Stuart was awarded an honorary degree by Heriot-Watt University last year

That danger is right at the heart of Young Mungo. I have to ask about the fishing trip in the book, I say to Stuart. You’re not writing from experience there either, are you? You haven’t experienced what Mungo experiences?

“No, I haven’t. Shuggie Bain was autobiographical. But Young Mungo is really a work of fiction.”

Which also means the book’s lovely, consoling vision of first love (albeit one always under threat of discovery) is also drawn from his imagination rather than real life.

“That’s the part of the book I wanted to write. The rest of that darkness is only to make that lovelier, to make that shine more. And, unfortunately, I never experienced that either.

“Part of it is wish-fulfilment,” he says. “It sounds a bit hopelessly romantic, but the number of times I just stood at the tenement window and looked out and thought, ‘God, somebody has to be out there.’

“And so really Young Mungo answers that for me because Mungo looks out the window and James is literally in the tenement over the back.”

The threat of violence is always present in the book, as it was in real life, Stuart admits.

“I had seen a lot of violence I had seen a lot of fists I’d seen a lot of heavy drinking, seen a lot of what you would call sectarianism. They would have thought of it as banter, but it was pretty hateful, and I was terrified of it?”

In that sad sense Young Mungo is very Glaswegian. Sectarianism started at the dinner table in Stuart’s house, he says. His mother was Catholic, his father, though he didn’t stay around for long, was Protestant.

“And then of course I went to a Protestant school but had a Catholic mother. And as young kids we were separated, we were tribalised really quickly and told, ‘This is who you are, and this is who the others are.’

“And then it comes up through Celtic and Rangers, it comes up through scheme gangs and as you get to be 12, 13, 14 you start to defend your reputation. It becomes this rite of passage into masculinity when you live in the east end of Glasgow.

“And the truth is so much of it was mindless, if you really stopped to interrogate it. But every so often, a bit like a toothache, you touch on it, you touch on someone with a belief, and that hatred is red hot. It’s not just part of the banter of Glasgow. It is deep and it is severe. And that was always terrifying.”

Where would he be when the gangs started to fight?

“I was on the side lines watching it. I was always the kid who was trying to be close enough so people could say he participated.”

For Stuart life changed when his mum died when he was 16. He moved away to a bedsit on the south side of the city, escaped his tribe as it were, and was then lucky enough to escape his circumstances through education.

Actually, is luck the right word? He’s not sure.

“What I realised was it’s going to take me twice as much work as it takes someone else. And that’s the sad truth for lots of us of living in poverty. It’s going to take an enormous amount of work just for us to catch up with someone else who has had a more stable or privileged upbringing.

“I think we have to be honest about the fact that it takes working-class kids twice as much work as it does to everybody else, because the first luck you have to overcome is almost bad luck.”

Still, he managed to do so. He went to college, moved to America, started a career in fashion, met his husband, left Glasgow behind.

Well, up to a point. What both Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo show is a writer totally engaged with the place he grew up in. They are also, and this is a little overlooked in the response to them, deeply political books.

They explore what happened to men when they were thrown on the scrapheap in the Thatcher years. Men who did hard, dangerous jobs only to be shown the door, told they were not heroes but part of the problem.

“Masses of hurt there,” Stuart points out.

And yet Stuart’s writing is also full of love. And in the end that’s what you take away from it. Sometimes it is misdirected, sometimes it is misplaced, sometimes it is twisted into something else, but it’s always there.

“There’s a lot of very pure love in the book. Oftentimes, my characters express their love through how they care for one another, and I actually think that’s the purest kind of love.”

A chip supper can be love, Douglas?

“A chip supper can be love.”

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart is published by Picador on Thursday, priced £16.99

Shuggie Bain: the TV series

Douglas Stuart says his next book will not be set in Glasgow, but he’s not escaping the city of his birth totally. He’s currently writing a script for a television series based on his debut novel.

“I was a bit reluctant to be honest, Teddy, to spend more time with Shuggie and Agnes after 12 years carrying them inside me.

“But I was thinking about how important telly was to me and still is today. The people Shuggie Bain won’t reach, who won’t turn to a book, but might get something from the story, might see themselves represented.

“And so, I’ve actually become really excited to do it. I’m writing it myself. All eight episodes. Right now, it’s still in development but it’s been a good craft lesson for me to learn about drama, to learn about economy, to learn about action and consequence.”