You had to be hard-fighting and love football and hard-drinking. There was a very tight way that boys were allowed to be. “ ‘Young Mungo’ is a lot more fictional … but a lot of what Mungo goes through is trying to fit in quite a narrow world of masculinity.
On how “Young Mungo” is different from his first book But I was as poor as, as queer as, as touched by addiction as Shuggie is.” And certainly, Agnes is not my mother and I'm not Shuggie. “I wouldn't ever look at the book and say some of the events happened to me. And so from that place of grief and loss and just that human struggle is why I wrote ‘Shuggie Bain.’ She suffered with alcoholism my entire childhood from my earliest memories up until she died one day when I was 16, quite quietly. “My mother became a single mother through no choice of her own. … My own family went from a very working class family, where everyone had work, to a place where we couldn't find enough work some days. But unemployment under the Thatcher government went to the high 20 percents.
On growing up in Glasgow and how much of his own story goes into his book
But unless someone that you love really is failing or is flawed, then your love is not tested, and what is it really worth?” Interview Highlights The cover of "Young Mungo" by author Douglas Stuart. If you’re just a wonderful person, and I just love you, that’s lovely. “I only ever use darkness in my fiction to really compress the diamond at the heart of it,” he says. Or they’ve tried to change themselves in some way.”īoth novels dive into heavy material, Stuart says, but that darkness serves a purpose. “I think many people can relate to Shuggie, because they’ve felt like an outsider in the place that they live,” says Stuart. But he wants them to take away something universal about being an outsider, struggling with addiction and caring for one another, he told Here & Now’s Emiko Tamagawa during a live event at WBUR’s CitySpace. Stuart gives his readers vivid descriptions of Glasgow. This year, he published his second novel, “Young Mungo,” about a queer romance that leads to a perilious fishing trip. His 2020 book “Shuggie Bain,” about a boy dealing with his mother’s alcoholism and his own sexuality, won the Booker Prize. When novelist Douglas Stuart writes about his home city and its people, he wants his reader to feel immersed in working-class Glasgow.
(Sarah Blesener for Morgenbladet) This article is more than 1 year old. A portrait of Douglas Stuart at the Maker Hotel in Hudson, New York.
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