Douglas Stuart on Shuggie Bain, Storytelling, and the Human Condition (part 1)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Ceranti.

On the show today, Douglas Stewart, the Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo. Douglas Stewart is celebrated globally for his heartbreaking, funny and moving depictions of working-class life, identity and resilience. Shuggie Bain, his first novel, follows a young protagonist by the same name who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow in Scotland.

It is a story of addiction, sexuality and love as Shuggie wrangles with a complex relationship with his alcoholic mother. The novel was widely critically acclaimed, winning the Booker Prize in 2020 and both Debut of the Year and Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. It's been translated into over 40 languages and sold over a million copies.

Stewart's second book, Young Mungo, explores masculinity, queerness and working class life in 1980s Glasgow. Douglas joined us recently on stage at the Kiln Theatre in London to discuss his literary journey, the inspiration behind his award-winning novels and his insights on writing honest depictions of marginalised worlds rarely seen in the literary mainstream. Douglas was joined in conversation by award-winning journalist, broadcaster and documentary filmmaker Jenny Cleman.

Hello, hello.

Hello and welcome to this Intelligence Squared event. Douglas Stewart on Shuggie Bain, storytelling and the human condition. Quite a lot to unpack. I am Jenny Kleeman. I am really, really delighted to introduce our guest tonight, who surely needs no introduction, but I'm going to do it anyway. Booker Prize winning author and fashion designer. Shuggie Bain, his first novel, it follows a young protagonist, Barbarian.

by the same name, Shuggie Bain, who spends his 1980s childhood in a rundown public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. And it's a story of addiction, sexuality and love as Shuggie wrangles with a complex relationship with his alcoholic mother.

The novel was widely critically acclaimed, winning the Booker Prize in 2020 and both Debut of the Year and Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. It's been translated into 38 languages and has sold over a million copies.

His second book, I have to say, is equally brilliant, perhaps more brilliant, equally brilliant at least. Young Mungo, it explores masculinity, queerness and working class life in 1980s Glasgow. And it was a number one Sunday Times bestseller and a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. So let's begin with the fact that your novels tackle some quite unflinching, difficult subject matter here.

What draws you to the themes that you choose to write about? Well, first of all, thank you for having me, Jenny, and for hosting tonight. And thank you to everybody for coming out. You know, I don't think about themes when I write. I think about life. I never sat down with either of the novels and thought, I'm going to write about alcoholism or I'm going to write about patriarchy or about deindustrialisation. I really write about the people that I grew up around and the people that I loved and that raised me and loved.

And that's where it all sort of comes from. You know, the personal is political in my work, but the work didn't set out to be political. It set out really shuggy, especially to be a love story between a mother and son and sort of testing the bounds of the loneliness that they both go through and how they're clinging to each other as they're sort of experiencing that loneliness. And so it was a very simple sort of idea for me and

But the truth is, if you're going to write about the working class in Glasgow in the 70s, 80s and 90s, they went through a lot of big thematic things. And the challenge was to write about those things in a way that didn't feel like it was a polemic because I was writing with an awful lot of anger, an awful lot of grief for the people in my own family that I lost, for the things that swept through Glasgow.

I just felt like if I wrote with that anger, I wrote trying to convince people that I would lose them. And so instead I thought, I'm just going to write about sort of tenderness and about love and face these things as they come along. - So it is the characters that come first for you? - Yeah, always I think.

And actually, my books take a lot of drafts. I spent 10 years writing Shuggie Bain, but I realised later that what I'm doing is trying to make these people feel as real as they can to me, because I actually like spending my days with them, even when they're awful. And I write a lot of pretty awful characters. But for me, it's very soothing. So how much of those characters are really real? How much of this is autobiographical?

It's so funny, one of my favorite things is I was in Glasgow recently and I was in the back of a taxi and the guy realized who I was and he said to me, "Do you know we are doing Shuggie Bain tours of the city?" And he said, "For 20 quid." And he says, "We get it every so often, but for 20 quid we'll take people around the city." And I thought to myself, "Oh my God, I've got to warn people because most of the book is fictional and the places don't exist."

And then he said to me, "We know who Shug Bane is, you know, the father." And I said, "You do?" And he says, "Yeah." He said, "Big John McGuire from Knightswood, isn't it?"

And I went, "Oh, I don't think so." And he went, "Aye, John wears a suit, and he likes to pick up women in his taxi. He drives the taxis." And I thought, "Oh, my God, never meet John Maguire." But I think, you know, the characters are often composites. I'm not Shuggie. I didn't have the sort of the wherewithal that Shuggie possesses at times. I was confused often in my own childhood and just a wee bit shell-shocked. And in fiction, you can do that, but you can't do it too much because it becomes...

a little dull and so often the characters are just composites of many different people I know, you know. But one of the biggest compliments is when someone says, "Oh, I know a Ginty or a Agnes or that." And I think, you know, then I've represented the people faithfully. Because I'll be honest, before the book published, I was shitting myself about sort of going back to Glasgow because I'd written it from New York and, you know, you see paintings very clearly outside the frame.

But then suddenly it was the publication was coming and I was thinking, oh my God, oh my God, no, what have I done? You know, it's, it's going to be in Glasgow. And I was really grateful to the generosity of the Glaswegian people because they said, well, you've written about hard things, but you've written about the truth and they can, Glaswegians can handle the truth. You know, they don't like false flattery. And, um, and so that meant a lot to me in terms of sort of real people.

So you wrote the books in New York where you were a fashion designer. But books have always been important to you. I mean, have they always been? Which books were important to you growing up?

Yeah, books have always been important to me, but books were also very dangerous when I was a kid because I was a boy that was amongst other boys whose masculinity was very narrowly defined and books were just perceived as very feminine things. And it was a matter of public safety. You know, I was also a little, you know, I was a little gay boy who was doing everything he could to pretend he wasn't a little gay boy. And, you know, if you had a copy of Little Women, you would probably tell on yourself, although I love Little Women. And so...

So we just didn't have a lot of books. We didn't have any books at home and I don't really start reading. So I don't have a favorite childhood book. I get asked that a lot, but we just didn't read books.

It didn't make us any less creative or compassionate. It was just, they weren't part of our, I guess, part of our life. And so I don't really start reading until I'm about 16. And it came around because of two things. The first thing was, is of the 400 kids in my year at school, only 12 of us came back to finish fifth and sixth year at school because we had, you know, they had other pressing real life things to get on with. They wanted to go and work and get a job and get on with life. And also when I was 16, my mother died.

And so for all the addiction that I was dealing with at home, you know, you need an awful lot of peace in your life to be able to read, to be able to read a book. And I just didn't have that at school or at home. And then suddenly at 16, I had it and I had a desire to learn about the world and to disappear. And so the first book that I read and loved was Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, you know,

and then Jamaica Inn and that sense of adventure. But for me, Thomas Hardy was the guiding light when I was younger. And there's a ton of Tess in Agnes and there's a lot of Jude in Leek. You know, I think about the struggles around reputation for women and also working class men trying to improve themselves. It's universal and it's still relevant from the 1880s to the 1980s. So that's when you started reading books. When did you start writing?

You know, I'd been writing, I'd wanted to be a writer when I was a kid. I wanted to be a writer when I was 16, 17. I suddenly just loved books and also I'm an introvert actually and I wanted to be just in these other worlds.

It was a very compassionate, very kind thing. But my school, the teachers at my school said, you can't do that. You know, because I was kind of remedial with English and remedial with very academic things. I'd missed so much school because of bullying. And so instead, they steered me towards textiles.

which was a really sort of wise, insightful thing for them to do because they knew I was an artistic kid, but they also knew that I needed a practical job. I couldn't be an interpretive dancer. You've seen my legs. I couldn't do that. I couldn't, you know, I couldn't do something that I couldn't feed myself with. I was, I had no parents.

And so I went and I studied textiles, textiles became fashion. But almost as soon as I have some kind of sense of security in my life, I have a job finally after graduating, I start to write again.

But Shuggie Bain didn't, I graduate in 2000 and Shuggie Bain didn't come out, didn't start really coming together on the page until 2008. And it came from a deep sense of grief and homesickness and also a fracturing within me that I couldn't quite explain to anyone because I had grown up in poverty in Glasgow and then suddenly here I was in New York working in luxury fashion.

the people that I worked with in fashion didn't care, didn't want to know about my background. I had no way to relate it. And so I was just very lonely inside myself and writing was a bam for that. - I mean, I'm really interested in the story of how it got published because we both know in the world of publishing, people are looking for things that are easy to sell, easy to market. And this on the surface,

wouldn't be easy to sell. So how easy was it for you to get it published? - Oh, it was really difficult. I always feel like I should bracket this by saying it's hard for every writer. And so rejection is not something that only I faced. But it was really, you know, it was kind of, it was hard.

It was hard to get an agent, that took about a year. And then when she sent it out on submission, she said to me, you know, when you hear back from these publishers, do you want me to tell you? I can send you the letters, the email. And I said, yes, please. Because no one I know, don't ever do that if ever you write a debut novel. But no one had read my work and I thought, oh, I can take it. I'm from Glasgow, I can take it. And like really quickly, the rejections came in. And in fact, my favorite rejection was an editor writing to my agent and he wrote, I

I don't like it. Lunch?

And actually, I printed it out and I framed it because I just thought, yeah, nobody needs you, Douglas. Like, it was the best thing. But I was rejected 20 times really quickly. And actually, some of the rejection letters said, this will win the Booker, but I don't know how to publish it. And in a way, that's a rejection, but it's a rejection I'm grateful for because you don't want someone, it's a hard book, and you don't want someone to try and get it so that when they don't know what they're going to do with it.

But anyway, the night that I won the Booker, you go straight into this sort of junket of press. And it was all in the height of the pandemic. And so it was on Zoom. And so the first journalist, as soon as you have a little success, what they want to know about, first of all, is your failure.

And well, the first question is, is it'll be a difficult second novel. And I'm like, I've just published my first. He's like, how can you write another? But the other thing they say is tell me about rejection. And I started to say to the journalist on Zoom and, you know, my my publicist is there, my agent's there. And and I said, well, you know, and I was rejected 20 times really fast. And my agent took herself off mute. And she says, actually, you were rejected 44 times. We just stopped.

we just stopped telling you. And so it wasn't as hard as I thought it was. But everybody gets rejected and you just need one yes. - And why do you think that one particular yes came? What was it, do you think, that unlocked it?

I think I know why a lot of no's came. You know, they thought it was too sad, too Scottish. It wasn't doing what the zeitgeist was doing. You know, it wasn't where a lot of fiction writers were. I was also an older, chubby, bald man. And that's a hard sell, you know. It was a hard sell. But I think the one yes was I had a very brave couple of editors. I had one in the United States called Peter Blackstock, and I had one in the UK called Ravi Merchandani.

and they have fantastic teams around them, but they saw the singularity in the book and they believe very deeply in the ugly duckling, right? They believe in the one thing that does only what that one thing can do. And funnily enough, they're both Indian men. Even Peter Blackstock sounds like a Yorkshire farmer, but he's not. He's from Bath, but he's an Indian man. And

um and so i think they've also understood and they're both queer and i think they understood what it meant to be marginalized and overlooked and i'm just very grateful you know to their to their yes they had the courage to to take it on and something that might be a might that doesn't fit neatly into into categories yeah and i think not to over talk it because it's not my story to share but i think also as um

non-white men and queer men, they also felt overlooked in their careers often and in the corporate workplace. And so they were just very attuned to that and we kind of banded together. - And how much did Shuggie Bain, the book, change first of all, over the course of 10 years and then after you got that book deal? - Yeah, so I was working in fashion when I wrote the book. I had a full-time job and it was very demanding. And so I would write snippets whenever I had time

And the very first-- my husband was watching me do something. And I couldn't tell him what I was doing. And he didn't ask. But he knew just to give general space to this. And also, I think because I was busy, I wasn't annoying him or trying to get off with him. And so he was like, great. We've been married 30 years. He was like, awesome. He was like, just let him go do that. But after about a year and a half, I have this, what's the first draft of Shuggie Bain?

The book is 1,800 pages, the first draft, and it's in two huge legal binders. And I turned to him, not knowing what to do, like, I don't know what to do now. And I asked him to read it. And he's a very good husband. But he goes, OK. And he reads it. And I think he's going to be done in an afternoon. And of course, it takes him about seven weeks. And I pester the guy every time he sits down to watch telly or to daydream for himself. I'm like, hmm.

something you should be doing. I become, you know, I become that spouse that's like, you know, just a real nag. And after he gives me back the two binders and he's for the first little bit, for the first couple of hundred pages, he's really thoughtful and he goes through and he attends to every word. And then eventually you can see on the page and I have it as an artifact, the will to live just leaves him. He just like, and he just starts to take a thick black pen and redact it. And, and I say to him now, and I remind them often that he just

doesn't give feedback, he says yes or no, or his favorite was ug. Like just UGH, he's just like, oh my God, will you stop it? But that was all I had to navigate with. And after nagging him to do it, he gives it back to me about two months later. And I don't speak to the guy for weeks because I feel so violated because he did the very thing I asked him to do.

But it set me on my way and suddenly I had a real thing and I had someone who'd read it and who'd thought about it. And, you know, he gives the harshest feedback, but he has such a handsome face. And so I'm very lucky.

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Glasgow is almost like a character in itself in your books and so what was that like then writing about Glasgow from so far away? Easier in fact. Well I think oftentimes writers who are writing about their family or about their hometown if they're in that place

feel an obligation to always pull their punches a little bit and say very noble things about a place and at a distance I felt a huge longing and homesickness but I also felt a little bit of safety and clarity you know you can see the whole thing from a distance but you know Agnes is Glasgow in the book and what the city and the main character go through are the same thing there's sort of

it's crowded and it's busy and it's surrounded by friends and then it's betrayed. And then I say "et" meaning Agnes and the city, and then it's abandoned. And then it's marooned on the outside by industry and that, and then the hope is to return to the city. And so the city is just so alive and so singular, even within Scotland that

it cannot help but force itself in on the characters and onto the page. And it's a real love-hate thing. You know, my family in the East End of Glasgow, the unemployment was 28%, and it was there for all of my childhood. And we know that Thatcher's policies and the deindustrialization took 10 years off the life expectancy of a man in the East End. And

We still today, I'm often pressured to say, but everything's better. And it is in many ways. But in Scotland, 1,100 people died of alcohol abuse last year, and the same amount died of drug abuse.

That's not the people suffering, that's the people that were died prematurely from it. And so all of these things just make a fascinating place to write about. And you've got to contend with the people in the city. And for me, I come in a long-- I didn't think about this when I was writing the book because it would be too grand. I didn't have that much hubris. But I am in a lineage of writers that write about the central belt and deindustrialization. There's Gray, who I love. There's Kelman. There's Welsh.

but they often write about very masculine things. And for me, the city is actually really feminine, mostly because I was raised by a single mother and mostly because the people who understood and digested the city and made me understand it were always women. And so for me, I wanted just to write about

women and then sort of this queer boy that never gets to sort of have a voice and in fact sometimes people criticize the book they're like but there's the minor strikes and you don't talk to the minors and I'm like people have spoken to the minors what we don't talk to is about the single mothers and the mothers at home and the and the young gay boys that's where the silence for me was

And what's it like now when you go back, when you visit, when you do events like this in Glasgow? Do you see it as very changed? Do you see it as the same place? I mean, it is. It's hugely changed. And then it's not changed at all at the same time. So it's both, I think.

You know, it never really lost its compassion and its humour and its sort of sense of fun, I suppose, or its sense of sort of gallows humour. But it's also a city where too many people are still struggling. I think what's really changed there is we used to feel like a huge amount of solidarity and now I think people feel very alone and isolated in their struggle because there's been such a dissolution of unions and an organised working class.

But you know the city, one thing for me that's been remarkable is for all of the UK actually because the homophobia I write about wasn't unique to Glasgow. Britain was a deeply homophobic place everywhere except for parts, pockets of maybe Edinburgh and London.

But what's lovely about the sort of the liberalness that's come across Scotland is it feels very aligned with the compassion that was always there with the sort of, you're kind of like, yeah, you should always have been like that because you've always been warm, welcoming, equaling people, you know, that sort of have a real sort of levelness to them. And so I love that the city has shaken off that sort of very hard patriarchy. You're a New Yorker now. Mm-hmm.

Could you write about New York? I will, yeah. I will, yeah. But it's funny, like, every time I write books or I start to write my New York book, it's always full of Glaswegians. And so, like, I'm not quite sure what it is I'm writing. They just always show up. And I'm like, first of all, how did you get here? And, like, that could just be the novel itself. But I like how Glaswegians, I like how Scottish people view the world. I like talking to Scottish characters.

And so even when I write about other places, I can't help but see it through a Scotsman's eyes. Maybe that's my own sort of point of view, but I like how gimlet-eyed they can be and how clear and how they just say it very directly. And also how often they contain wild contradictions, you know, can be very harsh and also very tender.

So do you think of yourself still as a Glaswegian rather than a New Yorker? I think of myself as both. I don't think the world likes things that are liminal or both. I think it wants one thing. But I think anybody that grew up gay understands that actually sometimes you just don't fit in a box. You're just all over the place.

And, you know, and even somebody who grew up very proudly working class and then went to university, I've felt that as well. Like, where am I? Who am I? And so now I just think of myself as both. But funnily enough, I think, you know, some writers don't think of me as a British writer. British writers don't think of me as that. And then Americans cannot see me as American in any way. They cannot. And so, you know, sometimes when I go to an event in America and I'm like, well, I've been here for 30 years. Technically, I'm an American writer. They're like,

Nope, no you're not. No you're not. So it's what people project onto me. And were you trying to be published in America first or you just wanted to be published? No, I wanted to be published but I wanted to be, I had to be published in America first because it's where I lived and my editor, I needed to be able to see him and do all that and so that just became a necessary thing and

And that was it. And it's Grove Atlantic, which is the largest independent publisher in the States. It's not one of the big fives. And, you know, if ever you're in a bookstore, support your indie publishers, you know, really do because they're making difficult choices all the time and they're doing good things. Your books deal with really heavy, serious, difficult subjects, addiction, poverty, sectarian violence. But there is also so much that is...

there is so much tenderness and warmth and joy in your work too. Are you consciously trying to have that light and the shade? Are you constantly trying to take a reader on a journey that you're really designing for them or is that just how it comes out? - No, I definitely design it. The first thing is I have a really low boredom threshold. I get bored really easily. And I also feel like one tone of something is too much.

And I can tell when something's just grinding on a little bit and you've you've you've sat in one emotion and one of the great things about you know, Glaswegians is that very opposing things live together, you know

if you've ever felt the thrill of being in a Glaswegian pub on a Friday night where everything seems like it's going really well and then on a dime it turns to violence, you can know that you can be having the best laugh of your life and then suddenly it might be the last laugh of your life. And it's the same, you know, there's that really hackneyed phrase that says,

you'll have more fun at a Glaswegian funeral than you ever will at an Edinburgh wedding. And like, we love it because there's a rivalry there, but it is true. I think in the working class, we make the most of what comes to us and we can't always control it. And so you try and like laugh your way through or be together through the hard times, but then hard times come.

And so I, but I do design it and I think, you know, humor is a very manipulative thing. It's also a way to stand up to power. It's also a way to digest things. One of the big questions in the book, I think one of the things that people think about is mental health, but mental health was never a thing that existed when I was a kid. Nobody would ever say, how's your mental health? You know, you just, you got what you got and you dealt with it and some people couldn't deal, but

Agnes has no recourse to these things. And so often how she deals is with alcohol or she deals with humor and that's how they do it. And so that's just life.

You're writing about marginalised communities, people who are not often represented in books. Do you think about wanting to shine a light on those communities in a conscious way? Or is that just the Glaswegian voices that are accompanying you? I mean, is it something that you definitely want readers to come away with, a fuller spectrum of knowledge of the world? Or is it just what comes naturally?

Yes and no. It's too grand to say that that was the goal when I was writing my novels, but it also is because I'm angry, and I'm angry that, you know, the...

for example, my own mother was sort of killed by alcohol and was overlooked by a country and couldn't find any opportunity and made a bad bargain where she decided that it was safe to give her future to my father. And then my father squandered her future in being a selfish bastard, you know? And so when I write about those things, it's like I'm writing a little bit because

I'm angry about that and I want to answer the silence around it and I want people to understand women like Agnes and Jinty and little boys like Shuggie. When I wrote, you know, Young Mungo, I thought it was about two teenage boys who were falling in love and I grew up reading queer fiction, everything. You know, I really love Alan Hollinghurst but when I stand back and I look at it, I felt that

queerness and class were intersecting in a way that just abandoned the working class altogether in literature. We just weren't fairly represented.

And as I sat and thought about that more, I thought about the character of Chicky Calhoun, poor wee Chicky. And I realized I couldn't write about two teenage boys without reckoning with all the working class men who have lived and existed exactly where they are and whose entire story was lost to history, lost to their own communities. And so it's too grand to say I had something to say, but I also do have something that I wanted to say about these lost souls.

And do you think there is more of a space now when it comes to representation of queer people, working class people in publishing? Or is it still a difficult space?

a difficult field. I think it's still a difficult field. I think it's getting better all the time, but let's really be honest. Publishing is a lot of very middle class people and, you know, the art critic space as well. I think often about like who is the literature critic that does come from a working class background and there's not many.

And, you know, so it still is overwhelmingly a white middle class thing. And as the arts are underfunded in the UK and in America, as, you know, kids really have to make a tough choice whether they can go to college or not, arts increasingly...

increasingly seem like they're a luxury or a thing that only certain slices of our society can do. And yet you look at a city like Glasgow that is bubbling with arts and it's bubbling with arts because life is hard there and it has been hard. And so people have things to say, music, cinema, literature, and we have to just make sure that people always have like access to that and that they can represent.

But I do think that working class writers are doing really interesting things and they always have been. And I think it's been opening up more. I think what we have to be careful of is not being allowing ourselves to be divided, further subdivided as a queer writer or a writer of colour. I think oftentimes we do have to band together and say, this is also about class. But what is the answer then to all of that? Is it about, you know, it's now unfashionable, isn't it, to be thinking about diversity in recruitment of...

you know, within publishing houses or within critical critics, you know, that we seem to have moved into quite dangerous times when it comes to that. How can you encourage, how can we all encourage it to not just be the preserve of the privileged world of writing?

Well, the first thing is we have to be paid fair wages as writers and all writers. And it's still, you know, a place of penury for most writers. I mean, the wages, I think, are about £12,000 a year for a full-time writer, which is, you can't live in London on that unless you have some other major income. And so we have to make it be that people can make a living at it. And also that you have a government that talks about the arts as they understand and they believe in it.

We're celebrating Irish writers all the time in the past five years. They come from a system that supports them, but they also come from a country that understands their greatest export is people and culture. They understand it, and so they pay for it, and they believe in it.

And for me, Scotland has the exact same thing, right? Its greatest export is not in fact salmon or textiles. It is in fact people and stories and art. And yet we don't do that in Scotland. You think about the debacle with Creative Scotland and the mess there, and then think about how expensive it is to be in the South in the UK, but then everything has to be in the South because we're all concentrated here. You make it impossible for working class artists, you know, to live

and to survive, and it starts at the top, but it also starts with our publishers. - You are adapting Shuggie Bane and Young Mungo for BBC One and iPlayer. What is that like? If all these characters have just existed in your head and then you release them into the world as a book, that must be terrifying enough, but to have a team of people manifest it on screen, is it thrilling or is it terrifying, or is it both? - It's been...

It's, what has it been? Actually, it's been mostly sort of terrifying. It's been really hard because you think you know your work very intimately and then you look at it again. And when the medium changes, you have to change the entire story. As I say, you cannot just say that Thatcher was a twat. You have to show that she was in fact an evil twat. And so you've got to like change everything about how you do it. You've got to show the damage and show the story in that way.

And so it's been a real learning curve. A24 have been so wildly supportive. And I think that's a great thing to allow the author's voice to show how the story can come to screen. I grew up where telly was the only way we received stories, you know, other than oral histories or telling each other stories. And so for me, it was really important that this wasn't a film, but it was a

telly series because I don't believe 15 year old working class boys go to the cinema to see art house things but we will watch it on the BBC or channel 4 if it's on and so A24 like understood that and supported it and so so we're working towards that but it's it's been a joy and it's been really hard to

And also it's extended Shuggie in my life beyond the point of welcome, right? He was already in my life for 40 years and sometimes I wake up in the morning, I'm like, you're still here. And he's like, yep, and you've still got work to do, so. I'm not sure how far along you are in the process, but have you been talking about casting?

Yes. And is that a very difficult thing for you to think about, which human being is going to embody this character you invented? It was really difficult, but it also was very easy because I was lucky that I can't tell you who it is, but the two main leads are just generational talents. Yeah, no, I'm sure. I'm sure. Yeah. I can't see the audience, but I'm pretty sure. Yeah. I'm pretty sure somebody's listening.

So it wasn't difficult in the end, but was it daunting for you, the idea that there was going to be an embodiment of this character for you? You know, it's daunting. Yeah, it is. And also it's sort of like a finality to it as well. It sets it in stone in a way that you can't undo anything

Books still are wonderful places of imagination and in fact they're a collaboration between an author and a reader. I tell you the story but you imagine it and you sort of bring it to life and you have a version of Agnes and Shuggie in your mind that actually might not be mine. But when you suddenly put something firmly on screen like that then it sort of ends

sort of the imaginative process and so that will be a period of grief for me I think but also it's just you know I also have to think it's not really mine anymore it will be the director's and so you've got to let him or her do whatever they're gonna do

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Cirenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts. Don't forget, Intelligence Squared Premium subscribers can listen to the event in full and ad-free. Head to intelligencesquared.com forward slash membership to find out more or hit the IQ2 extra button on Apple for your free trial.

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