New York fashion is ta: I was born in working class Glasgow in the 70s, the queer son of an alcoholic singlemother.. it was tough
Booker Prize longlist author Douglas Stuart on using his background from tough city scheme as inspiration for his acclaimed debut novel.. and how he first left it all behind to chase his dream
SOMETIMES, riding the subway to his Manhattan fashion job, Douglas Stuart would get a faraway look in his eyes. He was not dreaming of exciting new things to do with extra fine merino.
In his mind, he was back in the grim schemes of his childhood. Seeing china ornaments, chipped after several moves. Smelling the mould on the kitchenette wall. Hunting for the dregs of last night’s Carlsberg Special.
In between designing men’s knitwear for Gap, Douglas has spent the last 10 years writing a novel based on his west of Scotland upbringing.
When his US publishers accepted the book, called Shuggie Bain, he burst into tears. The day the Booker prize longlist was announced, he and his husband celebrated with leftover champagne and a frozen pizza.
The author said: “I was blown away. There are so many really strong Scottish voices at the moment.
“I’m privileged to represent that with such an esteemed prize.”
Even if the book does not make it to the final six, Douglas has triumphed over incredible odds to have one successful career and now, aged 44, starting on another.
Shuggie Bain is not a memoir but it follows the shape of Douglas’s own life and it does not make pretty reading.
He said: “I was born in Glasgow, the queer son of a single mother who suffered with alcoholism and ultimately lost her life with it. I was raised on government benefits, a Monday book and a Tuesday book.”
These loom large in young Shuggie’s life. Monday is his mother’s disability benefits, Tuesday is her child benefit.
It’s his job to go to the Post Office, cash them in and try to keep some of the cash back for food before his mother necks the rest.
The story starts in a Sighthill high-rise. Shuggie’s mother, Agnes, is squashed into her parents’ flat with her own three children. He’s the youngest son of taxi driver Shug senior.
The book opens on menage night, with Agnes and her pals playing cards, eating chips and dreaming of what to
buy from the Freemans catalogue. Shug abandoned his wife and four children to be with Agnes.
Now he is offering her pals a “lift” home in his cab.
He moves the family to a dodgy sublet in a North Lanarkshire pit village. Coal is all but over, the last of the redundancy money behind the bar at the miners’ welfare club.
The other women immediately mistrust Agnes, with her lacquered hair and good coat. Shuggie is branded “a wee poof”. School was brutal. Shug drops them off then does a U-turn out of the cul-de-sac.
Douglas said: “I use my own experiences as inspiration. I am not Shuggie and Agnes is not my mother. I wouldn’t want anyone to think it’s a memoir. It’s turned up quite loudly in the book – it’s quite extreme, it’s not meek, it has things to say.
“But I’m happy to admit I was a gay boy in working class Glasgow and it was hard in the 80s.
“I was first called a ‘poofter’ at five-and-a-half and it stuck with me my whole life. Being a boy in Glasgow, everything was rooted in masculinity. It was about football, fighting, territorial gangs. It’s quite a specific way to be, you fall into that or you don’t.”
In the book, Shuggie is so busy holding a household together that his sexual identity is the least of his worries. His sister, then his brother, abandon their failing, Carlsbergpickled mother. Shuggie is left holding the benefits books.
“It’s a love that only a child can have for their parent,” said Douglas. “At the beginning, Agnes is thick with friends, she’s thick with love. By the end, she’s entirely by herself. It’s only children who keep running at the same problem.
“I wanted to show the siblings realising that the problem doesn’t lie with them. As the child of an addict, you spin a lot of plates.
“You think, ‘If I can be quieter or funnier or more distracting, if I can anticipate everything this person might need, then today might be OK’.
“Of course, it’s nothing to do with you really.”
Douglas’s mother died when he was 16. He carried on at school, discovered books, studied textiles in Galashiels. He said: “I worked five nights a week and all weekend, all summer and all Christmas to support myself.”
After his masters in menswear, at the Royal College of Art in London, he was headhunted by Calvin Klein. Douglas said: “One of his lieutenants said, ‘This is great, do you want to come and work in New York?’ Sure, why not. I begged two suitcases from my big sister, packed everything I owned and that was it.”
After Calvin Klein, Douglas moved to Ralph Lauren. “I found that a bit too rarefied. The conversation was always about how we can make something more fancy, more expensive, more exclusive.”
This sat badly with Douglas’s socialist principles. He felt more at home at Gap and spent 15 years working on sweaters for its upmarket Banana Republic brand.
He said: “I enjoyed being able to design things and see them on real men. I knew my family at home could afford it, everybody had access to it. I liked the democracy of it.”
But while he was making decisions about buttons, Shuggie began seeping out. Douglas said: “I was powerless to keep the book inside, it just came out of me. “There’s a healing that comes with writing the book, but an anxiety that comes with telling the story.” That’s not stopping Douglas doing it all again. His second novel is a Romeo and Juliet tale of two boys from different sides of Glasgow’s sectarian divide falling in love. To work on it, he’s stepping back from tank tops to spend more time with his laptop. He said: “It’s a big thing to take a 25-year fashion career behind the woodshed and shoot it in the face but I’d like to write full-time. I’m working towards that.” Shuggie Bain is published by Picador, priced £14.99.
Glasgow, everything was about football, fighting, territorial gangs