The birth of Shuggie Bain

He has just won the Booker Prize, but growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s, Douglas Stuart had no real thought of becoming a writer. His mother, whom he adored, was an alcoholic; his father was absent. They had no money and he was bullied for being gay. Then, when he was 16, his mother died, and he had to go and live on his own in a hostel. Two English teachers realised he was struggling, and introduced him to literature. He became a voracious reader, but it was too late for him to catch up on his education, and with kindly intent, they pushed him towards a career in textile design. It took him further and further away – first to college in London, then to New York. “There was no reverse gear,” he told Lisa Allardice in The Guardian. “There was nowhere to go back to.” It was in America that he started to write – while holding down a demanding job in fashion. The result was Shuggie Bain, a novel based on his childhood. Writing it was a form of therapy, he says. “Fiction allows you to take control of a situation that you might not have control over in real life.” But he was wary of creating a “poverty safari” for a middleclass readership. “People like to come through for a tour and then they go back to worrying about oat milk,” he says. “I thought, ‘Well if we are going to do that, then you are coming for a stay.’ We are going to look at a woman drinking. You are going to be in the room with these people to the extent that you are going to leave the book with some sense of understanding them.” The book is unsparing in its description of hard-scrabble lives; but he doesn’t see it as a tragedy, so much as a story about the strength of filial bonds. Shuggie Bain, he has said, “is about love before it’s about addiction”.

Seymour’s beauty secret

In the new TV drama Glow

and Darkness, Jane Seymour stars as 12th century queen consort Eleanor of Aquitaine. It’s a good part, and Seymour, 69, was happy to get it; but she isn’t so happy now. When she was offered the role, the producers assured her that she’d be Eleanor throughout – from the age of 25 to 80. “But before I even got round to doing it, without telling me, they found another actress to play me at 25. It’s something I really don’t understand at all because, believe it or not, and you can see on Instagram, they don’t even need to do the facial stuff on me. It works just fine.” She insists her youthful looks are not the result of surgery – though she has nothing against it. “It’s fabulous if that’s what you want to do, and obviously I’m looking around at people my age who look like Barbie dolls.” But it’s not necessary, she told Hilary Rose in The Times. To look younger is “super-easy”: you just put on a wig. It pulls your hairline up and gives you a natural-looking lift, “so there is actually no reason to get a knife out”.

Michael J. Fox has lived with Parkinson’s for more than half his life: the Back to the Future star was first diagnosed in 1991, when his career was at its peak. “[The doctor] said: ‘And the good news is you’ll be able to work for another ten years.’ I was 29!” In fact, he has never stopped working: he did a lot of voice-over work (notably in Stuart Little), and played a scheming lawyer who has Parkinson’s in The Good Wife. And he has managed to retain the positive spirit that fans first loved him for – though it’s not been easy. Two years ago, he began suffering acute back pain in addition to the pain he had learnt to live with from Parkinson’s. It “turned out to be a tumour on my spine and it had to be operated on or I’d become paralysed”, he told Benjie Goodhart in GQ. After surgery, he had to learn to walk again; then one day, having persuaded his family he could be left on his own, he fell – and shattered his arm. “That was the low point,” he says. “I sat underneath the phone, which I couldn’t reach, with my broken arm, thinking: ‘I’m full of shit. This optimism stuff is crap.’” Now he concedes that positivity isn’t “a panacea for everything” – and yet he still relies on it. “Parkinson’s can really do a number on you and may do a number on me yet. But [...] optimism is having the faith to look at it and to accept it. If you can’t accept it, then it’s going to own you.”