Poured Over: Douglas Stuart on Young Mungo

“I knew that after writing this sweeping family portrait that goes over about 40 years in the Bain family’s history, that for my next novel, I wanted to write something that was very focused, that was quite propulsive, and quite edited in the scope and the time that we spend with the characters. And so, for me, it was about romance. It’s about that love between these two young men.” Douglas Stuart has charmed more than a million and a half readers with his National Booker Award and Booker Prize-winning debut novel, Shuggie Bain. Douglas joins us on the show to talk about his incredible new novel, Young Mungo, optimism, writing about the working class and being gay, masculinity, love, mobility, Margaret Thatcher’s legacy, the importance of having a plan before you sit down to write, the writers who inspire him, and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with a TBR Topoff segment featuring Margie and Marc.

Featured Books:

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

Poured Over is hosted and produced by Miwa Messer. This episode was mixed by Chris Gillespie. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on oyur favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

Barnes & Noble: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the host of Poured Over and I’m delighted that we have Douglas Stuart, the author of Shuggie Bain and now Young Mungo with us on the show today. Many of you might know that should have been was the winner of the Booker Prize in 2020 and also a finalist for the National Book Award. And before we really dive into things, Douglas, I have to ask you a question. Do you think Mungo’s okay?

Douglas Stuart: That is the million pound question. I’m an optimist as a writer, and even when I put my characters through some trials and some trauma, I always believe in the hope of tomorrow. And it can be a very faint thing, the hope, it doesn’t have to be this huge shining sunrise, it can just be that we are still here, we can still get up again tomorrow. And we can keep going. And so I believe in good things for Mungo as I did for Shuggie at the end of the book, but I like to leave my readers with the question. And I like to make them complicit in imagining what might happen for this character. And also to really reflect on the social and the socioeconomic issues that are molding these young men’s lives.

B&N: So with Young Mungo, we’re back in Glasgow only now it’s the 1990s. Mungo is a Protestant kid. And he’s met this very nice boy called James, who’s also a Catholic, which complicates things. But how did Mungo start for you? Did you start with his voice? Did you start with an image? Did you just start with an idea?

DS: Yeah, after took me 10 years to write Shuggie Bain. And the entire time I was writing Shuggie, I had this other book that was just bubbling to get out. And I couldn’t give it attention. It was a bit like having kids where I couldn’t turn away from my eldest to look to my next. And really, as soon as I really felt like I was finished Shuggie, and this was about 2016. So I began writing Young Mungo, about four years before Shuggie even published, the book came to me almost fully formed, there was lots of details missing. But I knew that after writing this sweeping family portrait that goes over about 40 years in the Bain family’s history, that for my next novel, I wanted to write something that was very focused, that was quite propulsive, and quite edited in the scope and the time that we spend with the characters. And so for me, it was about romance. It’s about that love between these two young men. And of course, it breaks a lot of taboos for post-Thatcher, Britain, you know, we’re still living at the time under Section 28, which is very much like the Florida Don’t Say Gay bill, where you’re not allowed to talk about homosexuality, you’re not allowed to talk about it in schools or anywhere. And it’s also, you know, really at the height of the AIDS epidemic. And it is still forur, five years, I think, four years. In fact, before the first Pride march in Scotland, the very first small Primark. So these are just two young men, working class men, who are living in this time of real isolation, and they don’t feel like they have the support of the community around them or society as a whole. And I wanted to write about that so much of our queer canon comes from a middle class lens. There’s so many books that I love that have to do with boarding schools or exile to these large cultural capital cities or running away to London or Paris. And for me, as a young working class, queer man, my experience of coming out and coming of age just wasn’t like that, you know, the only streets I knew in the world were the streets that I lived on. And I had to reckon with belonging there. And I wanted to write about these two young men who are going through a similar thing.

B&N: It’s also pre-internet. So you’re talking about party lines, you’re talking about the personal sections of the backs of newspapers. I mean, you’re really, when you say isolated, are not kidding about isolation and loneliness, too, is something that doesn’t belong just to Mungo or James. Mungo’s family. His mother is now a single parent, his father has died. He has an older brother who’s 18, who, Hamish is a handful, to put it lightly. We’re gonna come back to him. And then we’ve got Mungo’s sister, Jodi, who is basically a second mother to him in many, many ways. And Mungo’s the baby, and mom has a drinking problem. And mom also disappears quite a lot. And like Shuggie, this is not autofiction. It’s Glasgow, it is a coming-of-age story. But this I just want to be clear, this is not autofiction. This is you sitting down telling a story. But it opens as a bank weekend holiday start. And Mungo is going off to the lake country with a couple of friends of his mothers to go fishing. I had quite a sense of dread as I was reading those opening pages, which as intended. But then we cut back to January. And this is where the story unfolds. And you cut back and forth between the Lake Country and Glasgow. And here’s Mungo, this kid saying, I’ve never been outside of the city. I’ve never been to a castle. I’ve never been to a lake. I’ve never been any place where the greenery doesn’t end. Now his experienced is going to be colored in a lot of different ways. But this kid is a product of his time and his place. He doesn’t have anyone but his older brother to model his behavior on which isn’t really helping him but he’s also not cut from the same cloth as his brother, can we talk about masculinity in your book and the different ways it shows up and how Hamish thinks he’s helping his little brother who he does love? But Yikes.

DS: Yeah, it is a book, I think about masculinity at the core theme. But before that, you’re right to talk about that sense of mobility. Because obviously, I’m writing about these lives, and I grew up very similarly. You know, I grew up in poverty in the same way that most of my characters experienced the world and in my 20s, I finally meet Americans as a Scotsman. Every American I ever met would say to me, Oh, I love Scotland. Have you been to St. Andrews? Have you been to Loch Ness? Have you been to the Isle of Skye? And the truth is, I’ve never been to any of these places in my own home country, because the question of mobility was a really big question for me. It was about money. First of all, I couldn’t afford as a kid to see these things. And remember the Highlands of Scotland or the certainly the lofts start about 30 miles outside of the city. They’re very, very close. But there was also a psychological barrier for us. And we couldn’t go there because we just didn’t know how to belong what we were meant to do. We didn’t have the right shoes for, what do you do when you go to the wilderness? Like, do you walk up a hill? Do you not? And so, in a lot of ways, the masculinity of the characters is really informed by this lack of mobility. And actually, before we talk about Hamish, Hamish says something really telling in the book where he’s explaining Glasgow as a whole, as the city and Glasgow is a very diverse city, it’s a city of about a million people. And I often focus on the families that are living in poverty or going through a difficult time with addiction, because that was very similar to my own experience. But Glasgow has enormous wealth, it has one of the oldest universities in the world that has some of the most interesting culture that you’ll find in the United Kingdom. And I didn’t actually see any of that until I was about 19. So really, the edges, you might call them a project, we call them a housing estate or a housing scheme. But the edges of my housing scheme were my known world. And it was only when I was 19. I got to see these middle class parts of the city. And I think that’s true for a lot of people. Even in New York here, I think that can be true for for kids living in poverty. What it means is that their kingdom or the streets that they live on, and Mungo’s older brother Hamish is the leader of the local Protestant gang. But that mobility also means that they’re always in these sort of raging turf pitched battles with the other hosting scheme, which is on the other side of the motorway divide, and that is generally run by Catholics. So it’s centered around the Catholic school, their masculinity becomes territorial as well. It becomes about reputation. These are young men that perhaps won’t have the ability to make their name in education or in something they achieve in their life. And so their names on the streets, through their sexuality through the violence through the control they have over the other young men is incredibly important. You know, they they’re making themselves legends, and Hamish, that is important for his masculinity. And it’s a book that focuses a lot on violence. There’s a long literary tradition about the gang novel, you know about these men who are in race or gangs, I think of no mean city when I think about the nonfiction work called freedom by Jimmy Boyle, but we think about the razor gangs that were running the Gorbals in the 40s and the 50s. And you will have seen it in television too. And what I wanted to do was just really take a queer character and drop him right in the center of that because Mungo just really is a very gentle, sweet, tender young man. But to be gentle and tender can sometimes be an act of incredible bravery when everyone around you wants you to be violent and wants you to man up and wants you to be hard and to choose to be gentle is often seen as a weakness.

B&N: Mungo is a really anxious kid, too, with a physical twitch that gets worse, the more anxious he gets. And, in fact, at one point, is chewing on a windowsill as sort of a comfort. You write about the othering people in a way, the women in Mungo’s circle, whether it’s his mother or his sister, God or the downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Campbell, they’re really sort of struggling with their role in society. I mean, here’s Mrs. Campbell married to a guy who’s lost his job. He is deeply unpleasant company in a lot of ways. God wants nothing more than to not be her mother and escape. She really is clear she does. And mom just wants to be happy and in love, and maybe also not parent, which is complicated when you have three children who do actually need their parent. At least one of them, and dad is dead. So really moms all they have. And here are these women trying to navigate these ideas of masculinity even in their own minds.

DS: Yeah. And in fact, a lot of times they enable bad behavior and men are they love it or the ask for it. You know, Jodi, for me, is one of the hearts of the book. She’s one of my favorite characters. Jodi is Mungo’s older sister and she’s very familiar to me on a personal level, because I knew many young girls like this, who if they grew up in a family with lots of brothers somehow were delegated or made a lieutenant and became these little mothers, even when they didn’t want to be. And Jodi’s in an especially bad situation because her mother is only 34 and her children are almost adults, and she’s just ready to start her life. She became a mother far too young. But God is also very invested in turning Mungo into a man. And she asks for violence for him at times, she asked her to sort of man up in many different ways, and yet she’s his biggest supporter, and the person who knows him the best. And the thing is, is when you live under a patriarchy, when you live in a place where masculinity is so oppressive, then everybody has some kind of role to play in it. And good people too, can become very complicit in holding it up, we actually see that in Shuggie Bain in a way where I wanted Agnes, how she felt very ostracized in the pit town, not to come from the men, but actually to come from the women around her women who should really have shown her some sorority verse So repelled by her addiction, and also threatened by her glamour, that they actually lash out against her. And in a way, they’re just upholding a patriarchy in many, many ways. And I found out in this book, it was really about these people trying to raise this boy between them, much of what I write about are dysfunctional families that come apart, that just disintegrate and then families trying to reassemble themselves, as many of us do. Sometimes we have to rebuild our families, if you don’t have a very strong family. And my certainly my family came apart. You know, Mungo is doing that with Mr. Calhoun, with Mrs. Campbell, with his sister, they’re all playing very different roles and raising this young man. And it just makes them all very complicit in how he turns out.

B&N: You have a line where Jodi is described as having the particular courage of a girl who never expected to be hit by a man. And that made me stop in my tracks as I was reading, that’s a really precise description of her behavior. She has a character arc, as you say, I mean, she is absolutely part of the system. But I couldn’t help root for her, and hope that her situation was going to be a little different. I mean, she’s trying so hard, and she believes in school, and she has a job, and she’s trying to keep her little brother on the straight and narrow. But none of your characters are aiming for canonization. And she’s certainly not one of them either. And she is a product of her time and a product of her place. And then there’s Mrs. Campbell, who, at one point comes out of her apartment, and she has pieces of cheese in her pocket and hands one to Jodi and hands one to Mungo, because she knows these kids are hungry. There’s so many moments where these tiny bits of kindness shine through, you have this balancing act that you do between the painful and the hard and sometimes very violent. And these just these moments of life where you think, Oh, I can exhale for a minute, I can relax, everything’s okay. In that moment, even though the neighbor is pulling pieces of cheese out of her pocket, which is quite the detail. What’s that like for you as the writer? It seems like you’re doing a little bit of a high wire act, making sure that the compassion comes through and that you’re not simply saying, oh, all of this is on fire, and everyone’s miserable. And there is joy, there is a lot of love, even though it shows itself in strange ways.

DS: Yeah. And actually shows yourself in very honest ways, I hope, because I’m fascinated by how we care for one another. I think oftentimes, in literature, how we demonstrate love is with words, or with beautiful prose. And actually, sometimes when you really love someone you might not have the language at your disposal. How you care for them is really how you demonstrate that love. And so Mrs. Campbell, just being aware that these children haven’t maybe had something to eat and feeding them and also having just carrying cheese in her apron pocket for them, you know, this really pungent orange cheddar cheese, but she does it because she loves them. You know, she loves these children that are her neighbors. And she’s aware that their mother’s gone missing, but part of it’s personal, I’ll tell you about the personal in a second, but I like to take very opposing things and put them together in my fiction. And if you are going to write about violence, it bores me to write about too much or too often. If you don’t juxtapose it with tenderness. I’ve always known that sadness, or any kind of feelings of woe or tough times are best cut with humor. That’s a very Glaswegian spirit, you know, we have a gallows humor. And sometimes the only thing we had at our disposal to turn around in life and things were not going our way was the ability to laugh at it. And so I try to really just have this very human approach where all of these things can exist not only on the same chapter, but sometimes on the same paragraph, you know, these things can turn very quickly. For me, it’s just been life. And I think when you don’t have the comfort of money, and you don’t have the ability to always control the larger situation that’s happening around you, you have to take life as it comes at you and you have to make the best of it. And so this idea of tenderness and sadness and violence with humor together is a very natural thing for me as a person, I understand that quite deeply.

B&N: Which brings me to James. James Jamison and his pigeons, and his dad who’s working on an oil rig in the very far north, practically in Norway. So James is essentially on his own. His mother has died, and he and Mungo meet. And James is a really sweet kid and Mungo, there’s a point in the book where you say violence is normal for Mungo, it’s just it’s part of affection. He can’t separate the two. He doesn’t know what to do with this boy who’s just very nice to him, and wants to show him his pigeons and show him what it means to run pigeons. But also they’re clearly falling for each other and they’re quite adorable. They’re young, they’re adorable. They’re figuring things out. It’s great. But James has a better sense of who he is. And he may not come from a perfect family. His dad has a lot going on. But he has a better idea of who he is and what he wants much more so than Mungo. Did you know that’s who James was going to be? Or did James reveal himself as you were writing?

DS: James began to reveal himself I was I was writing and a lot of it came from the symbol of the structure of the toolkit. And to anyone who is listening, I should explain what a toolkit is. Ducots are Glaswegian, dovecotes or columbariums. Were essentially after Glasgow deindustrialized very rapidly, there was a lot of wasteland around us that was not being used. And so men are oftentimes, they were unemployed or retired would build these very homemade, ramshackle slipshod structures, but the structures were about 20 feet tall. They looked almost like these very teeter totter towers out on the landscape. And the men would keep pensions in it. The pigeons were about pigeon fancying and so it was about really about luring other pigeons back to the Ducot and collecting all these different pigeons. And I knew when I was writing James, because he was quite a solitary man, I wanted him that to be the thing he was interested in. But the symbol of that tower on this landscape at the same time, it’s a very striking visual symbol. It’s a very sturdy, strong tower. They’re built almost like siege towers, so that you can leave the pigeons that can be safe. No one can break in no one can kill the birds or steal the birds or harm them. And yet, they’re also a very ominous in a way, they’re very lonely on the landscape, because they just stand out there. And I thought about this young man who is the solitary figure, he’s very upright, he’s very strong. He’s got a good moral code, and yet he’s very compartmentalized. On the outside, he seems like this upstanding young man. And then on the inside, he’s hiding all of these very delicate, fine feelings about himself all these very precious things. And so he has that compartmentalization, in a way. As soon as I started to sort of engage him with this pigeons, he became a more fully fleshed out character, but I’m fascinated by motherless sons. I’m a bit of a motherless son myself, I was a fatherless son. My father left us when I was about four years old. And then my mother died when I was 16. And so both Mungo and James are motherless sons too, although in very different ways. James’s mother died early of a disease, which has devastated him and Mungo, his mother’s just very wayward, she’s always on the wrong looking for a good time, I thought, how lovely for these two young men to find love with each other. And to sort of be so close, a big part of it was growing up queer in Glasgow, myself, I never knew if there was other gay men around me or gay women or anybody else, because the visibility was zero, you weren’t allowed to identify as any kind of alternative sexuality, I had always just held the stream. Of course, statistically, there has to be someone on the next street or a couple of streets away. We just never knew it. And so I was really taken by that vision of someone just looking at a tenement window and seeing another young man in a tenement across the way and then being that close together geographically, or being divided by so many things.

B&N: Poor wee Chicky, or Mr. Calhoun, the neighbor downstairs, Mungo. He’s got kind of a heartbreaking story and a role to play even though he and Mungo both sort of know that the boy is queer. Mungo’s, 15 he’s figuring out what all of this means. And he knows he loves James and James knows he loves Mungo, but I really love Mr. Calhoun. He’s such a character, and his little dog, and he just puts up with so much, but man, he is trying to reach this kid, and he’s trying to say, Hey, listen, you don’t have to stay. You don’t have to live like this. That’s a big part of what Mungo is wrestling with, though. I mean, at one point, he’s just kind of throws up his hands and says, Well, of course, I’m just going to be where my family is. I’m going to be with my brother and continue to do what he tells me to do, please don’t do that kid. That is not a good plan, kid. But Mr. Calhoun, when did he show up? In the story in the writing?

DS: Actually, he was one of the last people to show up to tell the story of this young man. And he’s so necessary for the story. I think, actually, he’s my favorite character. But much of the book was about tenement living and about these neighbors living in this, you know, you see them in the East Village of Manhattan, but very close vertical communities, and they look out for one another, they really take care of one another. And there’s no secrets that you can keep because everyone’s on top of each other. And Mr. Calhoun is this very upstanding man who lives on the ground floor of mongoose tenement and he has a history and he has a past but I was thinking a big part of the motivation for writing the book by I think was to readdress working class queer history and how actually we don’t have any there’s no records and there’s there’s not a lot of fiction or cinema that ties around to like working class gay men or women. I’m always fascinated by all the stories that must have been lost to time or never heard. And certainly in a way, without giving too much away, Chicky Calhoun is almost the Ghost of Christmas Future for me. You know, I think that’s the fear that I could one day have become this man who decides not to live in his sexuality openly not to pursue love, but instead just becomes a very upstanding member of society and sort of compartmentalizes themselves and closing himself off. And of course, he’s a really great support for Mungo, but he has a lot of sadness in his life is missed his own chance for love. And yet he really looks after this young man at the heart of it. He was one of the last characters to come to the book.

B&N: Did you need to leave Glasgow to write these novels?

DS: Leaving Glasgow wasn’t a choice that I had, I was orphaned at 16. And when that happened, there was no anchor, and I had to go anywhere that someone would give me a job. I never, at 16, imagined it would bring me ultimately to New York, and I would work in New York for over 20 years. But I had no desire or design to leave Glasgow. In fact, a lot of writing these books is comes from a place of homesickness comes. I write them in New York, but I’m thinking about home, not just geographically, but also a time and a place and a community that we don’t often hear from and so that, for me has been writing the books has been a huge bomb for how I felt about my home country. And also, I think the distance has given me a clarity, which has been really useful. An ability to see things from the outside and to understand what parts of Glaswegian culture what’s part of being queer and working class that other people might not be able to access or know about. One of the things about writing Shuggie Bain is I rarely speak to someone without saying I didn’t know Thatcherism was so bad. And of course, anyone that lived under it understands Thatcherism was terrible for the working classes when unemployment went to 26%. But I’ve been surrounded my life with people who didn’t know the real story because there’s a lot of silent pain in Scotland, there’s a lot of stoicism with the man, we bear our hardships quietly and with dignity. And so we don’t often talk about that distance allowed me to know that people didn’t really know these parts of history, and made me want to write about it.

B&N: I’m having a moment when you say people didn’t know that, Thatcherism was that bad. And I’m thinking it does come back choosing how you engage with the world around you and what you need to know and what you don’t need to know.

DS: Certainly through the lens of fiction, which connects you and I, you know, fiction in the United Kingdom is what has, for the longest time be controlled by middle class voices. And for a lot of middle class families Thatcherism was great deregulated markets, it entered industry, it began privatization. And so if you think about an Alan Hollinghurst novel, per se, you know, if you think about The Swimming-Pool Library of a line of beauty, Thatcherism was terrific, these were heady times, but for working class families that were outside of the cultural capitals, these were terrible times, just you don’t often see that in literature.

B&N: One of the things I appreciate about Young Mungo. And the characters as much as some of them drove me up the wall as they were meant to do. They’re all very real, and they’re very honest. And they’re very messy. There’s an earnestness and an honesty to them that I don’t always get to experience. And it’s similar reading experience to Shuggie Bain. And I wasn’t really fully aware of how many people had rejected Shuggie before it was picked up by your current publisher. And I’m having a moment because while I was researching for this show, someone said, Oh, well, we don’t think anyone’s going to really relate to this story of poverty in Glasgow, and I’m thinking that sounds like Pittsburgh, in the 80s. That sounds like any place where the ports have closed, and the textile mills left the South in America and furniture factories, all of these things. And I’m like, wait a minute, this sounds, the accents are a little different. But it doesn’t sound like we’re talking about science fiction. I mean, it sounds like it could be your neighbor. And it just isn’t Glasgow, and I’m still having a moment processing that.

DS: And that’s exactly right. And I think that was the early resistance to Shuggie Bain and publishing it. Because I think American publisher saw this as a very other story, who was where Scotland is, who cares about Glasgow, who cares about this family. But the truth is, is a story about a single mother, and a young queer boy who is running this really narrow masculinity and can’t find his own voice. And that could be Detroit, it could be Appalachia, it could be Pittsburgh, it could be Albany, it could be Naples in Italy. And one of the things that Shuggie has verified for me is that actually it’s a universal story. We only use specifics in fiction in order to tell truths about anywhere. And that’s really been how the book has connected with so many people because actually, this could be anybody. Agnes is in every woman in many ways, and Shuggie goes through a journey that many young queer people can relate to. And a lot of ways it’s the same with James and with Mungo for me you spoke about a little bit about characters being incredibly flawed, I try as a writer to imagine these characters before they even arrive on the first page, every writer does this, but for me, they’re continuous lives. And they come with so much. And then they also leave the book at the end with so much still yet to come. And we can only really know these people for a moment in their lives. But I don’t believe in good people only doing good things. And I don’t think you can ask a reader to love a character. Unless you can love a complex character, a whole human being. And maybe it’s my own experience, but I frequently find human beings disappointing or not doing what I wanted them to do, or even people that you think as good people not acting in the best way and bad people are also redeemable, they have a reason. And so much of the catharsis that came to me through writing Shuggie Bain was not about sharing any trauma that was in my life through the book, it was about understanding the motivations of characters, understanding how hard it is actually to be a straight man, which is a controversial thing to say, but how hard and oppressive it is also to be a straight working class man in an industrial place, things like that. And when I could do that, I could have much more nuanced characters, much more sympathy. And I was just more invested in them as a writer.

B&N: Yeah, Hamish has a moment where he’s telling Mungo that he wanted to get an internship at one of the shipbuilding yards. And the day he goes down in his little school uniform is the day that they have had massive layoffs, and he’s watching all of these men leave the shipyard and he’s just really kind of mortified that he thinks he’s just gonna bounce down there. He’s really upset. And that’s sort of when he drops all of his ideas of ever going to university, which he’d had teachers say to him, Oh, boys from your background don’t do that. And he really had plans for himself and ideas. He does love his little brother. He just has really extreme ways of showing that he loves his little brother and make some really unpleasant decisions. But Hamish feels doomed, in a way by his own lack of resources. And I’m not just talking about money. I’m talking about his character and his belief. And honestly, these little boys that he’s surrounding himself with in the gang. He is posturing in ways that are not going to help anyone including himself, and certainly not his little brother. And you can’t help but root for Mungo and think, okay, dude, you just step to the side, just stepped to the side. Yeah, he’s your brother. And yeah, you don’t want to live and that push and pull between the two of them. And it’s not just that Mungo is gay. It really is a difference in consciousness almost.

DS: No one has ever believed in Hamish. Hamish is the eldest of the three siblings, and they’re very close and age, and no one has ever believed in him. They’ve never said to him, he can be something. Jodi has a sense of self belief, and Jodi believes in Mungo, but no one has ever said to Hamish, you can be anything you want to be. And he has come in to his manhood in the post-Thatcher years were already there was a sense of nihilism in the community. You see that in the work of Irvin Wales, where young men are looking around the thinking, why even bother, you know, it’s not there. What are you doing to me anymore? Where’s my hope going? It’s like, why even bother? You know, I’m gonna turn into these darker things. And in a lot of ways, Hamish is incredibly successful. Hamish is the toughest guy on the screen, he works very hard to maintain his reputation. But he understands that he has to do these things. He’s extremely things First, he has to be the first to the punch, the first of the kick, the first of the violence in order to keep his supremacy in this community. And I have an awful lot of sympathy for Hamish. He does a lot of very difficult things. But I think oftentimes we vilify working class men, white working class men, where we think they can often be the root of a lot of evil in society. And I think we’re all complicit in that. It’s a very circular conversation, because we don’t believe in them, we don’t give them opportunities. And then we blame them for how they turn out. And we’re in this together in a lot of ways and, and so I wanted to, you know, just look at this guy and have him be a Mungo’s example of masculinity. He’s the one you worry that you don’t want Mungo to be like big brother.

B&N: Young Mungo is coming out after you’ve sold roughly 1.5 million copies of shuggie vein worldwide, and you write the kinds of books that make readers want to reach out. And now you weren’t able to tour obviously, for the paperback of Shuggie. And hopefully, you’ll be able to tour for Young Mungo, but what have you learned from your readers?

DS: The first thing I’ve learned is that so many of us carry trauma in silence. And whenever we’ve been dealing with addiction issues, especially around women, or around mothers, we really try to contain that at home because society tells us to be very ashamed of it. And I can’t tell you the amount of pain that I’ve had access to in the world where people have been really suffering and I’m grateful for them to share their stories. I’m not sure, I’m not a therapist that can help, but I was really struck by that. I was really struck as well by a universal chatons experiences. You know, I think some people can read a book like Young Mungo or Shuggie Bain. And thank God, Glasgow was really homophobic in the 80s. And the truth is, is everywhere was homophobic in the 80s. And even good people were homophobic. And I’m not saying that it was necessarily bad people that society just didn’t know another way to be. We use really derogatory language. We were just everything for these kids where they were receiving signals that that was not the right way to be. And that’s what publishing Shuggie Bain taught me. This is not as you say, a Scottish story. It’s a very sort of universal story.

B&N: Yeah, we really were barbarians. I mean, it’s doesn’t matter where.

DS: I’m thinking, I think I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. If anyone’s homophobic today, you know, straight in the bin with them. I’m not interested. But I think about, you know, even my grandmother, my grandmother didn’t have the language and couldn’t cope with gay men on television for that she wasn’t a bad person. She just didn’t know any better. And so I tried to give good people the benefit of the doubt.

B&N: So you mentioned earlier that you had started writing Mungo, while you were finishing Shuggie. It sounds like these books are all you know, what 400 plus pages? I mean, you have things to say. So what did you learn writing sugar you that you took into Mungo, as you were working?

DS: Actually, the very first thing I learned was to have a plan before you start to write. With Shuggie, actually, I don’t have an MFA. I didn’t study English literature. So I was teaching myself a craft as I was writing my debut novel, took me 10 years to write. But when I sat down to write the first sentences, I wouldn’t allow myself to admit I was trying to write a book, because if you think about the end result is too intimidating. How on earth are you going to get there? So I focused on the sentence, on the paragraph on the page. But the thing is, is the first draft became 1800 pages, you know, it was this monstrous thing. And I felt this huge sense of achievement until I turned around and had to edit it into something. For much of it, Shuggie was growing with me, almost nobody, we were growing together, teaching each other things. And I just knew before they started writing Young Mungo. I was like, Douglas, you better have a plan, you better know how you’re coming in, and how you’re getting out because you’re not going to write another 1800 page book and then figure it out later. And so that’s what that’s really what Shuggie taught me.

B&N: Can we talk about literary influences for a second? I mean, I know you’ve mentioned Alan Hollinghurst. And you’ve been compared quite a lot to Dickens. But who are you reading? Who are you recommending? Who are your authors that you’d like to go back to?

DS: For me, I my influence is quite diverse. In terms of Scottish authors, I think I owe an enormous debt to James Kelman who was the first ever Scottish Booker winner. I’m an enormous fan of Janice Galloway and Agnes Owens who write west of Scotland fiction with a realistic slant. I love Alexander Trotsky’s Young Adam. But those are the classics for me. Batty Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave. These books that look at working class lives and don’t flinch and don’t seek to sugarcoat it in any way. I am a huge Toni Morrison fan. And also Cormac McCarthy in terms of the Americans reading was something I came to quite late in life, Miwa. I didn’t really read a book until I was 17-18. So for me, it didn’t have that experience of going around books that they just weren’t in my community didn’t make the boys and the girls around me any less creative or curious. It just meant books learned something that felt like them for us. And so since I became an adult, I just tried to devour as much as I can and take something from every book I read. And that’s an ongoing journey for me, which is exciting.

B&N: Do you remember what it was when you were 17 or 18? That you read that made you think, oh, right, I want more of this?

DS: Yeah, it was actually Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. And it was part of the curriculum. I mean, it’s not a very inspiring thing to say. But my English teacher just saw, you know, one of the things that happened is my mother died at 16. But at 16, high school also emptied out, I went to high school in quite a deprived area, and of the 250 kids in my year, when you turn 16, you can go get work, you can go get a job, you can get out of school, and my school emptied from 250 kids to 12. And so suddenly, I was in classes with teachers by myself, I know you look shocked, we can see each other really shocked, but it’s true. And it was then that also the teacher could kind of focus on me too. And that’s really when he starts to introduce me to Thomas Hardy and all these books that have stayed with me my whole life. But there’s a lot of Hardy in Shuggie Bain. People compare me to Dickens, but I think of Hardy more often because I think about the plight of Tess and how the men in her life change her fate. And then I think about dudes from Jude the Obscure when I think about Luke Bain and that eternal struggle of working class men to try and ascend to some kind of seat of higher learning.

B&N: Do you have a favorite moment from Young Mungo?

DS: My favorite moment is when the boys take a bike ride for James’s birthday, we you know, the essentially just pick a direction. James turns 16 and Mungo gets a bike and he says, we’re just going to ride a bike, we’re gonna go see something of the world, not just these four streets, James picks the direction and the ride in that direction. And they come across a beautiful wall. They get disspirited first because they come across a prison. They come across some neighborhoods that are in rougher shape in the room, but they persevere and they come across something really, really beautiful and they have a wonderful afternoon. That’s when they first declare their interest in each other.

B&N: You have a great line there, too. Eventually the city started to expand as if it was breathing. I really love that line. There are a lot of lines to love in Mungo. But I got really attached to him. I know we’re talking about a fictional character and I opened with is this kid, okay? And yes, he’s a fictional character. I understand this. But he is such a great, messy, messy, anxious kid. But he’s a really wonderful character. What are you hoping readers take away from Mungo’s story?

DS: I’ve never been a writer that looks to change people’s minds, I’ve spent my entire life being unable to change people’s minds, either through political argument, or through just showing the honesty of myself as a young queer person, you know, people would still hit me and I couldn’t change our mountains. And so I gave up the ghost on that years ago. And now I think all I want to do with my fiction is just move people make them feel bereft, make them feel a sense of love for these characters, almost as though they know them very intimately themselves. I can see what people take away from the book is really up to them. Because there’s no models in the book. And I feel like the reader brings all that to the page. I just want them to miss the characters actually, when that when the last page turns because before I’m a writer, I’m a reader. And that’s what I learned.

B&N: Before I let you go, what’s next for you?

DS: Oh, well, that’s a great question. Actually. I’m working on my third novel. So that’s coming along quite nicely. And there’s not too much to share at the moment. But again, it’s about the silence within families, this one that’s about loneliness, but in a very rural setting, and about how fathers and sons can keep secrets from each other. And then I’m hoping to be writing the television adaptation of Shuggie Bain. And so I’m working on that at the moment. I’m teaching myself how to write scripts, which is wild. I didn’t realize that after 12 years, with Shuggie and Agnes that I would be signing up for more years. I don’t know that I recommend that to anyone else, but it’s been fun. It’s been fun to learn something new, a new skill.

B&N: Okay, well, all of that is exciting new book, Agnes and Shuggie on the screen. But more importantly, Young Mungo is out now and I really, really hope readers get to meet this kid because he is pretty extraordinary. Douglas Stuart, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over.

DS: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a huge pleasure.