Douglas Stuart’s novels are exercises in loving, despite all the hard knocks life throws at his characters. In his works, Stuart fleshes out the love story beyond sickly sweet narratives that verge on fantasy, instead his stories throw their arms around characters often forgotten in literature - the working class, the rural, the queer.
In his critically acclaimed debut Shuggie Bain, Stuart chronicles the relationship between a gay son and his mother Agnes, who is suffering with addiction. His second novel Young Mungo is a brutal yet tender story of two young men who fall in love against the backdrop of a world marred by toxic masculinity and homophobia.
Now, the Scottish-American has conjured a more contemplative novel John of John, set on a fictional Scottish island in the Outer Hebrides. In an interview with The Mirror's Dr Aimee Walsh, Stuart discusses the inspiration for his latest novel, queer writing and Britain’s problem with working class arts.
"We just have so few accounts of working class lives, and definitely of working class queer lives," Stuart told The Mirror.
Glasgow-born Stuart shot to success in 2020 when his debut novel Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize. He accepted the award over video-call from his couch, and since the lockdowns were lifted in both New York, where he has lived for many years, and the UK, his life was changed forever.
A Quiet Masterpiece
Quiet, gentle, and totally heart-wrenching, John of John is Douglas Stuart at his best. Books are often described as ‘future classics’ but John of John is a modern classic in the here and now. The novel was recently selected as an Oprah Book Club Pick as well as a finalist for The Orwell Prize in the Political Fiction category. Surely, John of John will be on any Booker Prize list this year.
On the surface, the novel is about a prodigal son Cal returning to his religious community in the Outer Hebrides. Though it becomes apparent that this is an emotional exploration of the difficulties of expressing sexuality in rural Scotland.
When Cal returns, his complicated relationship with home becomes a backdrop for the desires and loves of the islanders. In John of John, Stuart does not consider love to be a pursuit of the young. Grandmothers and fathers pine and lust, plan and pursue their desires.
Devotion by its nature cannot be frictionless. What is a commitment if not an active decision? John of John shows that to love despite it all is a beautiful testament to devotion, to choosing to have faith in living authentically.
Inspiration from the Islands
Before his debut novel had even been published, Stuart had his first two novels completed. The first two books were brutal and emotionally charged, so the writer sought out the Outer Hebrides as a sanctuary. After spending 16 weeks on the islands, he was struck by inspiration to chronicle the rural, queer working class experience.
"I've never met such generosity," Stuart said of the islanders he met on his travels. Over the months he was on the islands, the writer spoke to “hundreds of people” at kitchen tables, where “hundreds of hours of audio interviews” were recorded.
"I was listening to a woman one day talk about the men and the women that she'd known that had never married and why," Stuart said. "And I just said, ‘You know, well, of course, some of them might have been gay’, and she sort of went, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no.’"
"And that was a generational answer, right? She was an older woman. But I suddenly thought to myself, Oh, there's just an erasure here, you know? It's not that it's bad, or that there's anything cruel or homophobic about it - it just doesn't exist."
Stuart added: "Every so often I was hearing about the men and the women who'd never married. One of the things I kept hearing over and over again was they missed their window for love."
"I discovered lots of those families where men had lived close with each other, or two women had shared a house, but they were ‘friends’, and [it was] like they just didn't exist. They had no visibility."
Queer Literature and Reclaiming Lost Stories
Queer literature reclaims the loves lost, erased, forgotten, and deceased without record - and John of John is part of this wave of new works seeking to redress the silence. Stuart said: "There are gay men and women who have never got to share their stories, and especially if they were working class. If you cannot be yourself in [working class] places, then you can’t be yourself… You've got to be yourself where you are."
"Within the queer community, we have lost so much of our own history. Part of it is because we could never be visible or speak out about it, because people had to hide for their own self protection. But then also because we lost generations to disease."
Stuart explained: "Anytime we talk about class, the cities take all the energy." But the shift has begun. "One of the things that's been really remarkable over the course of my life is the dismantling centres of elitism in the arts," Stuart said. "When I was a kid literature felt very much for them and not for us."
"I feel an enormous amount of responsibility to keep the door open behind me. So that other people can come in, and whether that's queer people, Scottish people, working class people, island writers, whatever it is."
In that spirit, the award-winning author tells The Mirror about the authors he is most excited about right now, from Irish writers Elaine Feeney and Louise Kennedy to Scottish writer Tom Newlands, and queer writers K Patrick and Anthony Shapland.
A Life of Struggle and Success
Stuart now finds himself at the heart of the literary elite, with interviews in broadsheets internationally and being a household name. Of this, he said: "It's a weird thing to feel like an outsider your whole life and then in a blink of an eye, suddenly you find yourself catapulted into the centre of British culture with the Booker."
The Glasgow native grew up in poverty in Scotland. At 16 his mother died from addiction, which left teenaged Douglas to navigate the world alone. The 50-year-old said: "When you lose a parent at 16, you lose your home, you lose your wardrobe, you lose the couch, you lose all your clothes, you can't carry it. I wasn't only suffering with the grief of losing my mother, but I was suffering with the grief of losing my home, and my city. The rupture was total for me."
"I remember being at college and being so sick one winter, like, deathly sick. And all I wanted to do was go home, and there was no home to go to. That was just never an option for me, so I just had to keep moving forward."
"When I was at the Scottish College of Textiles, it was terrible. Our toilets froze over one winter. We couldn't pee for two weeks in the student accommodation we were in. I had to go use the public toilets, and all I wanted was to go home somewhere, and I just couldn't."
This reality - of a teenager who loved the arts and had no home to return to - is the beating heart of why the arts need to be funded and accessible to the working classes; these stories need to be told - and beyond that - they must be funded. Stuart added: "Nobody rushes to fund working class stories in the way that they fund some other things. And so the fight continues."
John of John by Douglas Stuart is out now.
