Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.
Michael Collina: Hi, listeners. This is Audible Editor Michael Collina, and today I'm thrilled to be speaking with Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo Douglas Stuart, about his latest book, John of John. Welcome, Douglas.
Douglas Stuart: Oh, thank you for having me, Michael.
I'm so excited we have you here today and thank you for taking the time. So, this novel follows John Calum-Macleod, or Cal, as he returns to his strict Presbyterian community in the Western Isles of Scotland after attending school on the mainland. It's a story about family, community, tradition, and generational trauma. But John of John is also the first book of yours set outside Glasgow, set instead on the Isle of Harris. What inspired that change in setting?
That's a great question. I think I began the book not quite knowing what I was getting into. I started it, actually, in 2019, before I published Shuggie Bain, which I think was the book that introduced me to the world. But I had grown up in Glasgow, in the inner city, and I had never really seen much of my own country, because we were a family that didn't have much money. So, in 2019, I was full of all that sort of anxiety that debut novelists have when they're waiting for their book to come out in the world. I said to my husband, "I think I want to go and sort of travel around Scotland and see what I feel.” I've always wanted to go to the Outer Hebrides. I think he was just sick of having to deal with my anxiety, so he co-signed that idea.
I went for 12 weeks to this chain of islands that I'd never been to before. I thought, "If a story emerges, that's a great thing, but if not, I'll get to know my own country a little bit better." And it's just such a singular place. It is so beautiful. The Outer Hebrides, for any listener that doesn't know, is off the northwest coast of Scotland. They're the furthest islands that we have, and they're almost on the way to Iceland or Greenland, if you're thinking about it geographically. And so I went, committed to 12 weeks, and just travelled up the archipelago and saw what came.
I will say, I think you did a beautiful job of capturing kind of the sense of the islands. You felt it in every piece of John of John. The pace of the book felt a little bit slower. It felt a little bit more meandering, in the best way. Also a little bit quieter than your previous novels. So, did that quieter, more pastoral setting for John of John change the way you approached writing?
Oh, absolutely. One of the very first things that I had to surrender to was the heartbeat of the islands. I'd written two novels about the working class, but I realised that when we talk about class, we often exclude rural places or agrarian communities, and that felt wrong for me if my larger project was to write about what it meant to be queer and working class. And as soon as I got to the islands, I just realised that time operates in a different way. The overarching thing is that there is such a long memory of place and such an intergenerational concern about reputation and about being thought of well and going through all the generations not reflecting any shame or anything on the people who raised you or the people who came before you.
But it's a place that is absolutely dictated to by the seasons. It takes almost a day to get there, so even just travel is a thing that has its own sort of pace. But the seasons shape everything on the islands, and then underneath the seasons is the weather. It's known for its scouring winds because it's the first sort of landmass when you come across the Atlantic. So it gathers all of that power and then sort of buffers it before it hits the mainland. But there's also a very dominant church culture on the islands, and so church has its own calendar, too, and its own heartbeat and rhythm. One of the things that's very important is the Sabbath, where everything stops, everything closes. There is no work. There is also no recreation. Everyone is meant to sort of sit and be quiet and reflect on God.
"One of the very first things that I had to surrender to was the heartbeat of the islands."
Then, because I set the book in a sheep farming community, there is really the life cycle of lambs and rearing sheep. The men are weavers, and so there is the production of cloth. And so even if I'd arrived on the island thinking I had a structure or a plot, that all had to be thrown out because you've, first of all, just got to give into place, I think.
And you did it beautifully.
Thank you.
It came through in every single word, and it was such an experience. It was just so incredible on every single level. You also really nailed this quiet sense of desperation and restlessness that is just so unmistakable in every part of the story within every character. What was it like writing so many different generations and families that all seem to have this undercurrent of restlessness and desperation to them?
Yeah. You know, at first, I didn't know that's what I was going to do. I thought it really was the story of a prodigal son returning home to the islands after he thought he was sort of being allowed to go out into the world and become his own person. It's that moment in many of our lives where we go to college or we get our first job and we move away from our families and finally we get to be whoever we want to be, or whoever we've been dreaming of being.
In that moment, Cal has called home and he returned right back to the place that raised him, which is a wonderful place. It's so heavenly, in fact, even though the landscape is very barren. But I had been on the island sort of searching for the story, and I was there for about six weeks—I was there 12 weeks total, but by about the sixth week, I had met lots and lots of people. I'd only arrived knowing two people, but I was met with such generosity, Michael, that people would give me lunch and sit with tea with me and just talk to me. This is before Shuggie published, so nobody knew who I was. I was just a random guy that showed up one day.
I was hearing about every little settlement that I went to and I was asking about. "Tell me about what happened and who the people are, who your neighbours are." And for such a community-based place, I was thinking that every settlement had a handful of bachelors and a handful of women that had never married. Out of maybe only 20 houses, there was always a few. I was curious about, like, “Why do you think that is?” And whoever I was talking to would often say, "Well, this person missed their window for love. They missed their opportunity." I thought that was such a sad idea, that in rural places your chance to find love is very limited because unless someone comes right past your door, you might never meet them.
But I was listening to this for about six weeks, and I said, "Well, and it's very possible some of them might be gay, too, and that just made it harder.” It was such a throwaway line for me. I'm gay. I thought of it very naturally. And the woman I said it to sort of reared back, and she went, "Oh, no, no, no, that's not possible." She wasn't homophobic, she wasn't cruel. She was just very surprised that I would think that. And of course, I thought, "Well, some of these dozens of people I've heard about, some of them must have been gay." They couldn't come out, they couldn't be of that generation where they could claim their own lives. And in that moment, I realised it's not about the prodigal son returning home, it's about the people he returns home to, and about the lives they never got to live, how they felt stuck. From there, the novel just burst forth.
That's the perfect segue into my next question, actually, which was just to hear about how you found writing a father-son dynamic like John and Cal's. It simultaneously feels so distinct, but also their experiences and trajectories are pretty perfectly mirrored in one another, almost as if there is an undercurrent of expectation that Cal's just going to simply follow in John's footsteps. So, what was that relationship like for you as a writer?
I'm so pleased you said that because, actually, I was raised without a father. My father left when I was about four, so I never really knew that relationship myself. I think in a way, writing this book became a little bit of an obsession of mine about trying to figure out what a father and son mean to each other, how they can love each other, how fathers try to mould their sons in their own image. And probably after writing two books about sons and mothers, it was time to give mothers a rest and sort of hold fathers accountable for what they give as inheritance to their sons.
"I realised it's not about the prodigal son returning home, it's about the people he returns home to, and about the lives they never got to live, how they felt stuck. From there, the novel just burst forth."
But even though I didn't have a father, I felt very shaped by men my whole life, and not always in incredibly positive ways. I felt like I had to conform. I came from a place where heavy industry was very important, where masculinity was expressed in very narrow ways. You had to be strong and brave and certain always. You could never show any weakness or any feelings. You had to be hardworking, hard drinking, often, hard loving. You had to think a lot of women, while at the same time not thinking very much of them, not very interested in the interiority or their feelings. That was how you were a man where I grew up. That was how you would be a working-class man. So, I felt that sort of pressure to conform to that, and yet at the same time, I could never fit in.
It was so obvious when I was about six years old that I had too much to say. I had too many feelings. I was too expressive. I wanted to be things that just the men around me felt very anxious when they got around. So, this was a book about sort of exploring that. What happens when a father himself, because John has his own secrets—Cal, I think I should probably say now, is gay. He realises he's gay when he's at college and he has to bring that home to a very conservative Calvinist household. But John also has his own secrets. And so John is, on one hand, trying to raise his son in his own image, but at the same time, John hates his own image because John is struggling with his own sexuality. And so there's a huge gulf between these two men.
They couldn't be physically closer, Michael. They work together, they worship together, they eat together, they live in a quite small house by the edge of the sea, and yet the emotional distance between them is leagues apart because they cannot be honest about their feelings and about who they are. And so as a writer, it was a technical challenge for me. How could I create this claustrophobia and this tension, while at the same time having readers believe that if men could just talk about their feelings, everything would be okay?
I will say you definitely hit that perfectly in the final product. There's such a tension to their relationship where you just kind of want to scream at them and be like, "Just speak with one another! Like, it's all right there. Please just have that conversation." So, I mean, you did that beautifully.
We would've won Olympic golds if it was a sport. If emotional avoidance was a sport, of the men who'd raised me and the men I was raised amongst, we were world-class at it. I think that was really the information, the feeling I had going into writing this.
There's also this unifying theme of finding your place in all of your writing. And you've been very open about incorporating much of your own experience into your stories. Much like Cal, you did attend an art school in Edinburgh, studying textiles, and then worked on a croft on the Isle of Harris. What was it like embodying a young man's return to that kind of environment based off of those personal experiences of yours?
Yeah, in the writing of the book, I kept thinking, "Ooh, I can't believe I'm going to write a book about weaving." But when I stand back and I think, "Oh, I have two degrees in weaving," it was almost inevitable. This is probably a book I've been meaning to write for almost 20 years. It felt just very natural to me. And what a joy also to write about men, working men, who create beauty in the world, men who are very concerned with colour and pattern and they make this really magnificent cloth, that's how they make their living. I should probably tell listeners, Harris Tweed is a very sort of rare product in the world. It is a woven tweed cloth where weavers make the cloth on looms that are in sheds behind their homes.
"We would've won Olympic golds if it was a sport. If emotional avoidance was a sport, of the men who'd raised me and the men I was raised amongst, we were world-class at it."
It was sort of established centuries ago as a way to give families, to tie them to the land, to allow them to survive, but also to sort of celebrate all the colours and patterns and textures of the islands, which are very singular places. And as the world modernised, as Scotland went through this huge industrial revolution and became a very heavy industry country, Harris Tweed never modernised. It decided the important thing about the manufacturing was always to allow people to stay on their land and to just have enough work to get through. I think there was probably points in history where that seemed antiquated or out of date, when everything started to become mass-produced and then it went to the Far East. They sort of resisted a lot of pressure to modernise. But now when I see it, I think, “How wonderful that this rare thing is still made by hand in the Western world by men that sort of take all the inspiration from the land underneath them.”
So, it was a joy to write, Michael. It ultimately was inevitable for me to write about it, but it was also an experience to be on the crofts. Crofts are small subsistence farms. They're small plots of land that are unique to Scotland, for any listener listening. But to just be immersed in this way of life that has been going on for hundreds of years, I felt very lucky to witness it.
I'm so glad you brought up your own experience with textiles because there is such a beautiful focus on colour and texture throughout John of John, which is not only important to Cal and John's work as weavers, but also ties back to that experience of yours, especially with the degrees in textiles, with your experience in fashion. What was it like being able to incorporate that part of your life into the story?
Yeah, I think it sort of came full circle for me, because in many ways, I'd wanted to be a writer when I was a young man, but because I grew up in a place that had a fair amount of deprivation, I didn't grow up around books. By the time I demonstrated an interest in books at 17 or 18, my teachers really, in a way, were trying to help me, but they guided me towards textiles and away from literature because they knew I had to be able to compete, I had to be able to excel, and I had to be able to support myself when I graduated college. Both my parents were dead; my mother had died from alcoholism. So, in essence, I was homeless and any education I undertook had to sustain a whole life. So, my training in textiles becomes a training in fashion, but even when I'm working in the fashion industry in New York, I want to be a writer. I write in secret and in private, and I think that's a very good thing.
I think for lots of writers or anybody listening to this that has dreams of being writers, I think the richer your life is, the busier you are, you have more things to bring to the page. So, don't believe that the only way to be a writer is writing every single day and only writing. It's good to have life perspective in other places. But it took me 10 years to write my debut novel, and then I didn't know what to do with it, so I started my second novel, which was Young Mungo, and I was just writing without ever publishing. So in a way, to now be a published writer and to have realised my dream that I held for about 20, 30 years in that sense, and worked away on quite quietly for many years, and then to come back and loop it back around to textiles, felt just like I was in the right place at the right time.
I was sort of, I guess, not to be too grand about it, but I was uniting all the parts of me in this one novel and sort of bringing it all together. But textiles is also a really handy metaphor for me. I think about how you create tapestries in novels. Certainly, as a textile designer, you learn the patience to focus on the minute and to think about repetitive actions over and over and over again. And then you sort of stand back and you zoom out and you see the larger thing you're creating. In many ways, those are great skills for writers. It's very similar to when you're writing a novel, you have to focus for endless hours on the word, on the sentence, on the character, and then hope that it's going to make this very rich tapestry.
That is so beautifully said, Douglas. Thank you. John of John also features a lot of Gaelic, which is a huge aspect of the Western Isles. Dialects in particular have always been important to all of your writing, but how did you find the right balance of different dialects, different languages, and regional phrases throughout John of John, because it is a little bit more distinct than your other work?
Well, first of all, thank you for calling it Gaelic [GAL-ik], because lots of people call it Gaelic [GAY-lik], and that's obviously the Irish language. But yeah, Scottish Gaelic. I, actually, I'm lousy with it. We didn't get taught it in school, and so anything I learned I had to pick up as an adult, and my pronunciation would horrify anyone that was a natural Gaelic speaker. But Gaelic is a minority language in Scotland. I think about 1 or 2 percent of the population can speak it at all, and even less people speak it as a primary language. I wouldn't want to call it endangered because it has seen a resurgence over the past couple of years, but it's such a part of the Scottish identity that I just wanted an opportunity to celebrate it. But on the island, it has a very complicated history.
"But textiles is also a really handy metaphor for me...you have to focus for endless hours on the word, on the sentence, on the character, and then hope that it's going to make this very rich tapestry."
The islands are where it is the last stronghold of the language. But with the horrors of colonisation and with centralised governments down in Westminster and in Edinburgh, for many years it was almost beaten out of the islanders. It was, first of all, seen as the language of peasants, and then it was seen as something that was holding a community back. And the thing is, is when you tell people that, oftentimes the people themselves start to believe it. Your parents might speak Gaelic, but then the children don't want to speak it because it's not modern enough and they want to be part of the larger world.
I wanted to look at this community where they were very proud Gaelic speakers and that it was central to their daily life, but it's also a dramatic tool in the novel, because Cal and his father, John, both speak Gaelic as islanders, but Cal's grandmother, who Cal has come home to take care of and look after, actually is an immigrant from Glasgow, from the mainland, and she, to everyone's belief, only speaks English. And so oftentimes when John wants to exclude his mother-in-law from anything, even in the house, he won't speak in English, he will speak only in Gaelic. And that creates this huge division in a house that's very, very small. I'd loved writing in these different frequencies and using it as a dramatic tension tool where you have people sort of talking at the same time but pretending that they don't understand one another.
So, Ella, Cal's grandmother, is also an integral part of this story, and she is Glaswegian. She doesn't speak Gaelic. But tell me a little bit about Ella's conception and what she means to John of John.
Ella was the most fun I've ever had writing a character. When I was writing about these two sort of taciturn Presbyterian men that were avoiding telling each other the truth, I realised I needed a foil for that. I couldn't have a woman who was very discreet. I needed someone who felt very big and irreverent and also a little frustrated at the men in the novel. I thought instantly of my own grandmother, a Glaswegian woman who I think ran the world, but ran it from the back. She had to deal with all the men in her family and in the community and in her own life who had control over everything from work to worship to recreation to everything. And yet they didn't have the emotional intelligence to deal with the complexities of the world.
My grandmother and my grandmother's peers would often have to just make sense of the world and make everything all right. To be really honest, when the men, when they got older and the men died, there was a great liberation for these women because they could suddenly just be free. I wanted Ella to feel like that kind of character.
She's also a woman that had to be worthy of Cal's love, so that Cal would come straight home to the islands when he's asked to return to care for her. But she's filthy-mouthed and she is cheeky and she stands up to the men and she doesn't follow convention and she's not afraid of the church and she's not afraid of any bully. It's like a Harold and Maude relationship through the generations. She's Cal's best friend, but she is also a corrupting influence in his life. She thinks his father's raising him to be too stern and too straitlaced, and so she loves to trade insults with them, and they have a game where they collect new insults, new swear words, new ways to insult people, and it's her favourite thing to do. I had such fun writing those scenes with her.
Yeah, Ella is such a force of a character, and I really did love seeing her dynamic with Cal. It was such a joy just to see both of them really embrace all sides of themselves and let themselves be free with one another in a way that they couldn't with a lot of the rest of their community.
That's right. I think gay boys are often sort of really drawn to their own grandmothers because they both have felt like they've survived the patriarchy in a way, or they're both sort of on the outside of a thing that tried to control them for many years. And for me as a young gay boy, I couldn't quite fit in. And for my granny, she had survived it. So, in a way, we had sort of a shared bond across generations, and I think that's something that a lot of gay men feel.
Yeah, and let's talk about sexuality for a second because it is such a huge part of this story, and as a gay man yourself, I'm sure a lot of those experiences that you've had growing up made their way into this story.
One of the things that I did draw on directly from life is I was a gay youth in the early '90s, which was a time of real darkness where everybody was sort of secret or closeted and it was just after the AIDS epidemic. So, I think as a young man, I wouldn't have believed that I could be a happy, healthy adult. I don't think anybody who loved me could have believed that was my future, could have been my future. But a way to connect with people when I was young was in the back of teen magazines, there was all these pen pals. You would write long-form letters to other gay boys in other cities across the country. I found a box of my letters when I was writing this book. I was like one of the Brontë sisters, you know [laughs]. It's when you write this long-form correspondence with strangers, "Tell me about the village you live in, tell me about the weather and your family."
We went back and forth for months and months. In a way, it was really beautiful and incredibly vulnerable, to share all of your intimate secrets with a stranger. I fell in love for the first time through one of these with another young man. I was looking back through all of the correspondence, and I realised also that this was before selfies. It was before computers. It was before anyone would even take a camera and turn it on themself. And so all the photos we had were from things like family birthdays or sitting on the wall at the bottom of your grandmother's house with your brand-new trainers on, sort of looking very proud of yourself.
In a way, to see people in those moments that were very unguarded and very intimate in a different way to how we understand intimacy today, where people send nude selfies right off the bat, is incredibly sweet and was incredibly vulnerable. You had to take all the photos and have them be developed at the chemist. They were very chaste and they were almost like old-school photos. And when I was writing the character of Cal and how he's searching for love, I drew on a lot of that, and that really took me down memory lane.
Oh, it's so fascinating to hear that there is a sense of your own story in that experience of Cal's, because it does feel just so, so real. You also have such a beautiful way of writing characters that feel like such real, complete human beings. But I was also absolutely blown away by Lorne MacFadyen’s performance of this novel. How involved were you in the casting?
You know, I had one idea, and that one idea was Lorne. I have been a fan of his for so long, and he is from the islands, he's from a slightly different island, slightly closer to the mainland, but I wanted for listeners to be able to sort of hear an accent that was of the place, and also someone who could read the text that would understand the people in a way that they can convey that to the listener, but also someone that was really comfortable with Gaelic. And Lorne is just such an authentic voice and such a powerful actor that he, for me, was my only choice. So, I was very thrilled when he said yes.
I love hearing when an author gets their first choice of narrator. That always makes me so happy.
We just announced it on Instagram recently and all my DMs were like, "He is so handsome." And I was like, "Yeah, I promise that had nothing to do with my selection, but he is also very handsome."
Yeah, definitely. And let's talk a little bit more about writing. So, you did win the Booker Prize for your debut novel back in 2020, and that's a pretty incredible start to a writing career. But you've also been very open about how there is a heavy expectation that comes with that kind of start. So, how has that shaped the writing of your subsequent novels?
In many ways, because I came from so far outside the literary establishment—as I said, I was working in a whole other different industry; I didn't study an MFA—when I sort of arrived and then I won the Booker with my debut was during the pandemic. I hadn't met most people. I hadn't even had a chance to foster a literary community of writer friends or even to meet people that interviewed me. Everything was done over the computer. And there's a really funny thing that happens in Britain when you win something, is in the celebration, there is almost a negative connotation, and they very quickly want to ask you about your expected failure. So, they would say, the journalist would say very quickly, within minutes of winning, "Congratulations on winning. Do you think your next book will be a flop or do you think will it be hard?”
"The books are sort of standalone novels, but in a way, they're a very loose triptych, and I think it is about dealing with queer people in a changing country. The backdrop, the constant character throughout, is Scotland."
I was sort of thrown by that. I would always say to them, which I felt very fortunate about, "Well, luckily for me, I'd written my second novel already,” because I'd already finished Young Mungo, and so that's why those two books come out two years apart. But the whole time I was saying that, I was working on John of John, and I was going home at night and I was thinking, "Oh, no, what if this is over?” It's so much pressure. I was very aware of people looking at me to see if I would be a one-hit wonder or a one-trick magician. I think that's part of the reason why it took six years to write because I wanted to take all the time to prove that, no, I was a writer that could sustain a career, that had much to say, that could say more than just stories set in Glasgow. But you can't ever predict what people will think of a novel. So, as it publishes over the next month, we'll just have to wait and see if people like it.
Well, Douglas, I will say, I mean, I finished it. I absolutely loved it. I think it's very clear that you are able to write novels of the same calibre.
Thank you.
It's been incredible getting to enjoy and really just savour each of your novels and see the progression of your craft and just how beautiful of a storyteller you are. You have such a wonderful grasp of your prose. It's beautiful on every level.
I really appreciate you saying that, Michael. Yeah, the books are sort of standalone novels, but in a way, they're a very loose triptych, and I think it is about dealing with queer people in a changing country. The backdrop, the constant character throughout, is Scotland, I think, for these three. The characters don't know each other. They're not interrelated, the novels, they’re their own things, but it is about me wrestling with my sense of belonging, my own sense of belonging.
Scotland was a very patriarchal country that was very invested in industry, but now it's the most liberal country in Europe, and that happened very quickly. It happened so fast that almost I am astonished, because if you could go back in time and talk to 18-year-old me, I would say, "No, things will never get better or they cannot improve." And now, 40-something-year-old me looks back and thinks, "God, I'm so proud of my country, but I'm also kind of a little sad that it didn't come sooner and that I had to go through the dark times." So, this is just really my work about figuring out where I belong. And John is the last part of that, looking at the last moment in a country before it changes for good.
Do you think your next novel will also grapple with some of the same issues in Scotland, or am I sensing there's going to be a bit more of a departure there in the future?
Yeah. I've been a New Yorker now for almost 30 years, and so I think it's time I got to New York, I'll be honest. This might be my last Scottish novel, for just now.
I'm excited, Douglas. I cannot wait. I will be one of the first in line waiting to listen to that one.
Thank you.
I know you are a big reader. You've expressed that writing and literature has been such a big part of your journey, but are you a big listener?
I am. I am. My favourite thing to listen to is actually celebrity memoirs, or it doesn't even have to be celebrity. It just has to be own story things. I just finished the Lena Dunham book, Famesick, which I loved. And then also Kathy Burke, you know her memoir?
Yes.
I absolutely loved that. That was like spending time with an old friend. It's such a generous book, because she talks about being a young working-class girl in London but also trying to make her career in the arts. I thought it was such a deep, kind book and it had such a good heart. I was really sad when it ended because I felt like Kathy had sort of taken us in and allowed us to be a friend that sat with her for a while. I love it when people who write their own books narrate them in that way and tell us about their lives.
Absolutely. Well, Douglas, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today.
Thank you so much, Michael. It's been a pleasure.
It's been incredible. And listeners, you can find John of John by Douglas Stuart on Audible now.
