Douglas Stuart on Shuggie Bain, Storytelling, and the Human Condition (Part Two)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Cirenti. For this episode, we're rejoining for part two of our conversation with Douglas Stewart, the Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo. If you haven't heard part one, do just jump back an episode to get up to speed. Now, it's time to rejoin the conversation recorded recently at the Kiln Theatre in London. Here's our host for the evening, journalist and broadcaster, Jenny Kleeman.

Do you think that your book will be changed forever by the fact that it's been manifested on screen because people who come to it because of having seen it will be seeing it in their heads like they saw it on screen? Yeah, I do.

I think the death threats that I thought I avoided from Glasgow I'll probably get once it's suddenly on the telly. But yeah, I mean, you worry about disappointing people. You sort of live in real anxiety. And you don't want to spoil something either. But it was such a personal story that I almost couldn't give it to someone else to adapt because that just allowed another chance for it to get further from the source material.

To be really honest, when you do an adaptation, most of what you're doing is defending. And you're just saying, no, this is important and this is how it is. And this makes sense to me and to the characters. I remember spending a lot of time explaining the women in the high rise and how they spoke to each other was actually with great affection because they'd been friends for life. And just these London executives being like, it's a bit harsh. And I was like, oh, they love each other deeply. And I'm like, just trust me, trust me.

Has it changed your approach to storytelling, seeing how things are adapted?

Yes. The one thing about television or anything visual is, you know, a novelist, we have a lot of what we call color. We tell you it because we want just to tell you this thing. There might be a vase in the room and we explain it to you because we like that vase. And they say very quickly in television, you know, don't show a vase unless someone gets hit with it. And so that sort of like economy of storytelling, you know, you have to tell what is essential.

So you had written Young Mungo by the time Shuggie Bain came out, or you had written them both while you were submitting Shuggie Bain. So there wasn't this weight of expectation of the difficult second album. You already had your second album queued up and ready to go.

What's it like now? Do you feel a different pressure for your next book, your third book? Hugely, yeah, yeah. I feel a huge amount of pressure and I also feel just very inspired and ready to go somewhere else. I'm leaving Glasgow, I think, for my next book. I think I've sort of finished what I wanted to say about the city, although I'm staying in Scotland for this novel. And for me, it's also like a personal liberation to like move away and to spread my wings and

And so it's good for me as a writer too. But you know, one of the things, the joys of writing Shuggie and Mungo before I was published is it's lovely to create art in a naive space with no demands on it or no expectations because you just do it for the pure joy and suddenly you know

what the Times hates about your writing. And you like think about it every time you write a sentence or what readers don't like or what you've done before. And so it just becomes a much more complicated thing. You can never return to a place of naivety. And it's a shame because wonderful art comes from that. So how do you switch off from that? Are you able to switch off from that? No, haven't you been able to tell I'm a super anxious person? No, I think often, you know,

I think often that anxiety is sort of a foundation of art, questioning and feeling nervous. And, you know, if you're not feeling nervous, you're probably maybe not testing or pushing yourself. And so I just live in constant anxiety all the time. And I really do. And, you know, I'm probably not a joy to be married to, but it's not a bad place to create from.

And is your husband still always your first reader? Yeah, he fucking hates it. He really hates it. He's very good. We've been married, we've been together almost 30 years. And so God bless the man. But when he sees that like first draft sort of like come across the kitchen table, he's just like, oh no. And are there other books that you have written and decided...

to not take forward? I mean, how many false starts are there before you get two books like this? I mean, Shuggie Bain was a false start. You know, Shuggie Bain was a totally different book in the first draft. We go to South Africa with Catherine. We go all the way through Catherine's marriage. We see that failing. We see someone who's quite harsh on her mother also make the same mistakes where she gives her own future and agency to a man.

You know, Leek has a love affair and all these things. So in a way, it's a totally different book to the one that you get. And Mungo was a very sort of...

from beginning to end was a The same sort of thing because it is in reaction to Shuggie Bain Because that was such a portrait that didn't have edges. I thought to myself. I want to write something that is plotted and the tension is excruciatingly taught and so I plotted it very clearly before I wrote it and it stayed that way but this new book that I'm working on now, it's it is forever changing and

you know, a lot of what my writing is about is figuring out not what the characters mean to themselves, but what they mean to each other. And the minute that they change the thing on the third draft that they say to someone else, everything else that follows changes. And so I like to let a book live because I'm also maturing as I'm writing and I'm deepening. For me, it's really a process of excavation. And I sometimes start a book not knowing what I'm angry about, but by the end of the book, I know what it was. And so, and that's like a lovely...

place to be it's a healing in a way a healing uh now over to you i'm sure many of you have questions for douglas i always feel really guilty about this because i'm going to make you cover several miles over the course of this yes this person here in the middle hello hello um as a reader i can sort of sense that harrowing things are happening to your characters and yet i'm not depressed by them

you're carried along by something that I can't quite pinpoint. How do you navigate that?

Yeah, thank you for the question. How do I navigate it? You know, I don't have... I said earlier that I sort of manipulate the reader and I know when I'm sort of too long in a feeling and how to sort of leaven it. But I am also not that plotted. I'm not that... It still is moving by instinct. And I think, you know, I think the reason...

For both of my books what I'm writing about at the heart of it is love I'm writing about a mother and son love story and then two boys in love and

part of what the exercise is is testing that love and seeing how strong it is and seeing what will break it. That's why all the children leave Agnes except Shuggie doesn't because they're the prior tests and you know that's why Mungo goes through what he does not because I'm a particularly violent person or I like to see bad things happen to young men but because I want by that last page to know that what he wants most in the world is to get back to James. That's the love and so I think that's how I do it. I think

what people read as the darkness sometimes and what really is the important thing for me is the love. This person here. Thank you. Thank you. I've loved both of your novels. I think they are absolutely outstanding. It goes without saying. It almost feels to me that Young Mungo is the novel you wanted to write when you wrote Sugar Bane's

Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's a statement, but yes, actually. Yeah, you're right in many ways. I think I was learning to write through Shuggie Bain and by the time-- and Shuggie hung over me for a decade. And every time I sort of like wanted to write "Young Mungo," Shuggie was like, oh, but I'm not done. You've not quite solved it yet. And so it was a bit like having two kids and having your first kid just really be needy and not be able to do anything on their own, but your second kid just be really capable at the side.

And so when I could turn to it, I knew before I'd even begun writing it, the exact shape of it and exactly what would happen. And also it's a reaction, an artistic reaction from me against Shuggie, which is this portrait of a community and

life in decay. The structures of the book are deliberately very different because Shuggie's about spiraling into abandonment and things peel away all the way through. Whereas when I think about Mungo, it was about like tightening, tightening, tightening until it just bursts at the end. And I start with shapes. Sometimes I just draw the shape of what I'm trying to do. And then I work on the book that way. But yeah, Shuggie taught me how to write Mungo.

at the back up there. Hiya. Hiya. I just wanted to say that I'm a queer young woman from Scotland and thank you for writing these books. I don't live in Scotland anymore and one of my favourite things about the books was all the Scottish words that you don't hear down here. I was wondering if you thought a lot about the language that you used and have you ever felt limited in your choices to cater for not Scottish people?

Yeah, thank you for the question. Yeah, I mean, I think James Kelman approached it and broached it before it became sort of very fashionable for me to talk about it. He was talking about sort of imperialism and colonialism and language back in the mid-90s when it actually cost him a lot in his career. And now it's very easy for me to talk about it because we're all so much more aware. But the truth is, yes, you know, a big part of it is that it's a very important part of

part of the reason why the book I think was rejected often is because people didn't want to deal with dialect or with Scots or with that but you can't write about

you can write about these characters, but then you're on the side of the reader and not on the side of the character. And that's like just an instant betrayal for me as a writer. You know, if you're going to do it, you have to meet them exactly where they are. And when I talk about like colonialism, as you mentioned, the book has been translated into actually over 40 languages. I'm very, very lucky.

But I was at an event in Bristol and we were talking about translation and there was a woman in the audience and she was squirming and she put her hand up and her question was, congratulations on all your translations, but my question is, when will it be translated into English? And like...

Yeah, yes, there was a lot of that. There was a lot of his and I just didn't answer the question I just pretended I didn't hear her and then and then the week later I had dinner with Nicola Sturgeon and I told Nicola the question and I swear to God that's the closest I've ever come to having someone assassinated It did not go down very well, but but that's colonialism right? That's you haven't written properly when will we? understand it and

you can't do that because it's a betrayal of Agnes. And Agnes is also her chief betrayer because throughout the novel, she's pretending she's not a broad glass Norwegian. She is exactly like those women in that mining community, exactly like all of her friends. And we're conditioned often when we have regional accents to tamp that down, to fit in, to elevate ourselves. How does that work in translation then? If it's in 40 different languages, how is the Scots rendered in it?

Yeah, there's 40 weeping translators. Actually, when they were translating it, at first, I was just a very green novelist. And my agent said, will you help them? Will you explain things? Because there's dialect, but there's also words that just exist in Scots. And I said, yes, yes, yes. And about six months in, it was the worst decision of my life because they were really sort of...

you know, struggling through it. And so they pulled me out of it as the book started to translate in other languages. And a wonderful thing happened where they started a Facebook group where they were explaining to each other. And so the Korean translator was asking the Turkish translator, what is a close mouth? Like things that very simple like that, you know, what are palings? Things that they just didn't know.

And there is, the Facebook group exists and there's some sort of like places that I'm not allowed to look. But what they did, a lot of them did, and it's won a lot of prizes in translation, which is to credit the translators.

is they didn't try to take a Glaswegian family and then sound like they came from Brittany or somewhere else. They often invented a very neutral urban language for them because it would be weird to be like, oh, I'm in Glasgow, but actually I sound like I'm, I don't know, in some small town in Germany. That's weird. And so they did very inventive things. So interesting. Mm-hmm.

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it should be required or is, does it still exist? Yeah. I probably explained that not very artfully, but what I meant was I wasn't young and cool. I was a, I was a debut novelist that was well into his forties. And so I don't get even things that are important for young, for writers is a lot of young writers prizes and things like that. And I just was too old. And you'll hear many older writers talk about that. Bonnie Garmis talks about it. She was 66.

you know, I'm almost 50 now. And so there was a little bit of that because, I mean, if you just keep it between us in this room, but, you know, a lot of sometimes what publishers look at is how can you connect this writer with the readership and how can you make them cool in magazines and how can people feel like it's the next Sally Rooney or whatever it is. And so youth and that sort of

connecting with a zeitgeist or with a generation is important when they make decisions. They might not like to say it out loud, but it is. And everybody, I think, feels, I'm a white man, I'm aware of that. And so I think many writers are really, truly sort of judged against in a way that's harder than it is, much harder than it is for a white man. But there is that sort of thing for all writers where they're trying to figure out if you can be bigger than the book. It's quite cynical, but it's also capitalism. Mm-hmm.

The front here. Hi there. I just wanted to say you mentioned the character of Paul Weechicke and I really liked the detail of the phone line that James calls. I felt that obviously a lot of queer history and culture isn't perpetuated historically so it felt very nice to have that in the novel as it was something that I completely wasn't aware of.

My question to you is, you obviously write about poverty with a lot of sympathy and tenderness owing to your own experience of it. Is that something that you took with you to America and is it something that might appear in your next novel or do you feel that maybe as someone who wasn't born in America that you're sort of precluded from that?

Yeah, I think American poverty feels very different to British poverty. I do think, although it's eroding, we still have some kind of social fabric here. And it certainly stopped me from dying as a kid, you know. It saved my life. And I think, personally, not to get too political, it's something British people should, you know, really protect in all its sort of formats because it is what makes us a society. And America's a desperate, desperate place and is going to get more so.

But, you know, I also like writing about poverty. I think one of the things that is an accusation is that because literature is a middle class art form, when you write about poverty, it's somehow for the titillation of a readership.

It's not. It's the daily existence of 30% of the kids in this country. It is worthy of great literature. It is worthy also of detail and dignity and holding people in that space. It's not, you know, as we speak about violence and things, it's not just for your entertainment. It is because people, and I certainly grew up in that

condition. And so I like it. I also like how people think when they're in poverty. I also like when books talk about people's jobs, because my God, if we're not all at jobs for most of our lives, and if most of us don't have money worries of some form as well, you know, I always hate a book that just doesn't mention how people make a living or what they feel about money, because I think that's just not true. You know, no matter where you are in class wise, we're always, we're always doing it. Right in the middle here. I

Thank you, good evening. Thank you very much. I had a question on the editing process. I really love the book, obviously, that's why I'm here tonight. It went from 800 pages when your husband read it to, I can't remember how many pages, you've lost a lot of the story. Who else was involved in the correction, your editors? Did you change anything to be published at the end?

How does it work in practice and how much have we lost as readers on what you wanted to say? Yeah, you should be grateful for the loss because I'm not sure it was all good. You can ask my husband, I'll give you his email and he'll tell you. No, the book, the one he read was 1800 pages. It was actually 900 pages, single spaced, biblical text is what it was. And so when you format that for a manuscript, it's 1800 pages.

But, you know, over the 10 years I was writing on it, I was editing it myself. He only read it that once and then read it again very late. But from 18 it goes to almost instantly to 900. From that it goes to 800. By the time I go to submit it to the publishers, I think it's about 580 pages. I forget now. And the finished manuscript ends up about 490 as a manuscript. And so it continues to winnow back.

You know, my editor, God bless him, Peter Blackstock, had very specific feedback about what he wanted to edit. And I rejected almost all of it. And then he sort of sat me down and he said, look, my job is just to make you clearer. And I was still like, well, yeah, but I feel like I've been clear. And he said, then he said the most powerful thing to me. He says, if you think about this as a movie, every time the camera's not on Agnes and Shuggie, I miss them.

And I went, oh, OK. And he said, so read it again and think about that. And there you will find your edits. And so between us, we were able to sort of like find that and to pull it back. But he had to-- it was such a personal story to me that I was resisting him.

which is really dumb as well, but just I couldn't help it. And when he sort of, I'm a creative person too. So when he phrased it as a question, I was like, oh, okay, yeah, yeah. You know, I've been a designer my whole life. What we do is create solutions to problems. And so that was how I could get around it.

He's a fantastic editor. And also, I should say, he's from Bath. And so he was never daunted for a minute by the Scottish language. Not for a second. And in fact, there was sometimes I was like, I cleaned it up and he said, don't do that. And he said, don't do that. Which for an American editor is quite extraordinary. More questions.

that's shot up very confidently over there. Hi, I just wanted to say how much I've loved both your books and I'm so excited for both the adaptations too. This is a question not necessarily linked to the literature, but the cover of Young Mungo is such a powerful statement on queer love.

I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about the backstory of selecting that as the front cover and if the two men in the photograph have ever got in touch to tell you their particular love story. Yeah. Yeah, well, thank you for the question. You know, the photo is by a really famous photographer called Wolfgang Tillmans. And I believe Wolfgang's won the Turner Prize, but this was a photo that was taken in a club probably in 2002, I think it's called.

The Cock, which was the name of the club, and then in parentheses, The Kiss. And I remember as a young man, the vitriol that came out when this started to appear. It was in a museum in Washington, and a woman marched into the museum, tore it from the wall, and ripped it in two. And so people had a very visceral reaction to nothing more than two consenting adults kissing.

And when you ask Wolfgang, when I asked Wolfgang about this, he said, you know, it's funny because we watch war and genocide. It's not funny, but it's strange that we watch war and genocide and extreme violence on television. And we sort of we don't get angry or we don't get angry enough. And yet when I present this photo of two men, nothing makes people angrier. People feel really offended by this photo.

I had felt an enormous success with Shuggie and I'd felt very lucky, but I felt like I'd written two books that were about homophobia in their own way. And I was thinking a lot about queer books and how the covers are often coded, how it's kind of like discreetly like there might be queer things in this for you if you open it. And I thought, I can't ask the characters to go through that violence. I can't be writing about this and not be in some way brave myself.

And so I took it to my editor, Ravi Merchandani, and I suggested it as, you know, I would like to do this. And at first he sort of went, oh,

"I don't know, you know, that's commercially not a great idea." And he went away and he thought about it. He's a great thinker, he's a deeply thoughtful man, and as a queer man himself, he also wanted to sort of, you know, make some kind of progress. And he came back to me and he wrote the most convincing email, not to me, but to his colleagues in marketing and sales and publishing about why we need to do this.

And it was a very intelligent email, but the one line that made me laugh is, "Will they do it on Dancing with the Stars?" You know, we see, we're now kissing on Dancing with the Stars, and I love him for that. But then he said, "Yeah, we're gonna do it." And then I went, "Are you sure?" Like, I suddenly chickened out.

You know, it's a really powerful image for me, but I'll never forget the week that the book launched and I was in Birmingham on tour and I was just passing waterstones and it was in the window and there was these just, you know, schoolboys, 17, 18, just standing outside, just looking at that Tillman's image and it meant something very deeply to them. And then I was in Edinburgh that same week and the book was in the window of, not toppings, of Portobello Books.

and there was a couple, a heterosexual older couple standing there and I kind of came up beside them and I went, "How about that, right?" They didn't know who I was and the woman said, "That's a fucking disgrace." And because it exists in both those places, it's an important picture to put on the front of my cover, you know? And I'm very, very grateful to Wolfgang to allow me to do it. And, you know, I go into bookstores and people turn it the other way. Sometimes you're like, "Where's young Mungo?" And they're all turned backwards. And so we have a long way to go.

I think about all the Mose and Boone's covers that I saw as a kid and naked women on horses and naked men with swords. And I'm just like, come on. There used to be naked women on the third page of The Sun. I know, exactly. For years and years and years. At the back in the corner. You've made a few comments, both of you, tonight about the publishing industry and the struggle is to tell the underdog story. Do you think that's something that's getting easier or harder? Yeah.

Yeah about the underdogs I first I don't think I can claim to be an underdog any longer and so I have to say that that would be disingenuous of me but

I think it's getting easier. And I do think publishing houses do try their best. And I think what has been great, actually, is sort of how much sort of diverse voices have really come to the fore. I think a lot of it actually lies with the readership. I think what we owe those writers is making sure that we are reading them and that we're not just reading books.

I won't insert the name, but we have to also make sure that we are reading diversely because in fact it is a business and we need publishers to stay in business and how we make sure that we are representing more diverse readers is that bookstores and readers are buying them. So we also play a part in that and that's about all diversity. But they are certainly doing the best that they can. They're improving all the time. But it's a worry when the arts

becomes a sort of rarefied thing in this country. We've got time for a few more questions. Any more on the other side at the back? Hi, when I was reading one of my favourite things about young Mungo and this might have been inferred wrong but we got a visit from a very special friend from the previous book. What made you do that?

If it was done. I mean, that's why. Yeah. Well, thank you, because not everybody notices that. But yeah, Shuggie appears in the middle of Young Mungo for a couple of pages. I was thinking, you know, I was thinking about the tapestry of the city. I was thinking about myself when I was a young man and I was queer and I just didn't know that other gay men existed. But of course, you would cross their paths all the time and you must have collided and we were always there together.

And I thought about poverty and how that also felt like an island and how I felt like other people weren't necessarily poor. And so I didn't connect. And so I just wanted these characters to collide for a brief moment in the way that people do in cities and then pass on and leave each other behind because they have always been there and they've always been sort of woven together. And I think of it as a tapestry. I think of

Agnes and Momo knowing each other, not liking each other, but knowing each other and all the other characters. And so, yeah, it was just a sort of Easter egg-y joy for me to do. And also a little bit to let readers know that Shuggie's okay, because they also asked me now, is Mungo okay? And so it's nice just to give them a little clue to let them know, yeah, they're all right, they're fine. Over here.

Hi. I know you touched a bit on the publishing industry, but also I wondered if you have any thoughts about the AI and copyright in terms of writers and whether that's impacting you or affecting how you think about your future as an author and how you write? Yeah.

I mean, it terrifies me, and I can't quite get my arms around it right now, but I think the rewards are so low for writers anyway, generally, that the idea that somebody would pay a computer to do that just feels like the last gasp of the arts. So I believe in a lot of publishers. My own publisher seems to be quite firm against it, and that gives me hope in that sense. But, you know...

People say often well it won't be you it won't be your book It will be genre fiction or it'll be these things that follow very established patterns And I think that's also a terrible place to be one of the reasons why I read is to connect with another human I want to know what's going in and they're weird twisted mind I want to know the things that delight them and you know someone described books as just a repository for a writer's secrets and

And I think that's true. And so that's why I show up. And so I don't want to read a book written by computers. I don't want computers to steal my living. I don't want you to read books written by computers. And so I think we all have to be on guard

about it. But like the question about diversity, you also are not powerless in this. You can resist it too. A final question maybe from this person here at the end. Hi there. Obviously both books are utterly fabulous. And as a reader, we quite often take away a particular part of a story that resonates with us. Just wondering in either book, is there something that you're incredibly proud of or a certain chapter or scene that really resonates with you?

I love that question. I've never been asked that before. I'm a bit nervous to answer it because it would sound like I was bragging. But there are parts of the book that I'm fond of. I don't know that I think it's my...

my burden as a writer to like generally hate everything I write after I've written it. And, you know, I was reading from Shuggie the other day and I was just, I was thinking, Oh, I'm going to email my publisher and ask if I can rewrite it. Um, because as an artist or anybody you're evolving and you're moving and you're perfecting and you're sort of honing your craft. But I do love in Shuggie anything that has leak in it. Um, particularly because I like, um,

Not because I'm proud. I don't think they're the best things that I've written, but because I like his masculinity. I like that he's a heterosexual man, but that he has that huge compassionate heart that Glaswegians have. And I like in Mungo anything with Puruichiki in it, because I like just really that sort of, you

you know, these gay men that just never had stories, but they existed there. You know, part of one of the loveliest things that someone ever said to me was how Chicky had made that, it was a journalist, I won't tell you who it was, but it was a famous journalist. And she'd just said, you know, we often talk about like queerness as a loss for the queer person because the queer person often has to leave and go to a big metropolis. And she said, but I had an uncle and just one day my uncle disappeared from my life.

And actually the loss was entirely mine. And I think about like Chicky through that. I think about like not only how the queer people lost their families, but how that family lost that person. And so I like these sort of older queer stories. I would like to thank you, Douglas, for such a...

lovely warm fascinating conversation and thank all of you for such intelligent questions it's really been wonderful thanks to intelligent squared for uh organizing this event and uh have a very nice evening thank you so much for having us

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts. If you'd like to come along to one of our live events, you can visit intelligencesquared.com forward slash attend to see what we have coming up. Hello, I'm Tim Guinness, chairman and founder of Guinness Global Investors.

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