Douglas Stuart, John of John

Brett sits down with Douglas Stuart for his latest book, 'John of John'. They discuss his transition from designer to writer, what brought him to the books location, the Hebrides, the liberation of writing fathers and sons, living in a place with religious conservatism, queerness in a masculine environment, and returning as an adult to the home you grew up in. 

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https://www.douglasdstuart.com/

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https://www.instagram.com/douglas_stuart/

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Transcript

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Brett Benner 0:00

Hey everybody, it's Bret Benner, and w-welcome back to another episode of Behind the Stack. I am so thrilled to be sitting down today with an author whose first book had so much particular impact on me, as I know it did for so many people. The pandemic had just started, the lockdown was taking place, and at the time, we were all stuck in our homes. This book, I remember getting a copy of that had just come out, and there was not really a lot of buzz about it, nothing at all, and I so was blown away. I, I was just like, "Who is this person who created this world?" The book was Shuggie Bain, of course, and Douglas Stuart was, of course, the author. So cut to today to sit down with him after reading Young Mungo as well, which I loved so much, and to have the opportunity to talk with him about John of John, which is such a beautiful novel, once again, was truly such a treat. A little bit about Douglas for those of you who don't know. He's a New York Times bestselling author whose work has been translated into over 40 languages. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, won the 2020 Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It was named both the Overall Book of the Year. And the Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards and was selected by The Sunday Times as one of the 25 best novels of the 21st century. His next novel, Young Mungo, was a Sunday Times number one bestseller and a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. Douglas was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He has an MA from the Royal College of Art in London and honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow and Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. In a previous life, he was a designer for Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Kate Spade, and The Gap. Since 2000, he has lived and worked in New York City. So I hope you enjoy this episode of Behind the Stack. It's just so special that you're sitting here with me today. Douglas Stuart for his new book, "Jon of Jon," which is just so, so, so beautiful. I really just appreciate you being here so much, so thank you. I'm thrilled to get to talk to you.

Douglas Stuart 2:12

Thank you. Well, thank you for having me.

Brett Benner 2:13

So really quickly, I, I'm so fascinated because I don't know that I knew that much of your backstory before I started to dive into all this. Hmm. Because I sound... I find it so incredibly amazing that you had this whole fashion design career before you got into writing. Hmm. So I wonder if you could talk about that for a moment, but also I would love to know, too, at what point r- did writing kind of take over for you and supersede that? Or was that something that you always wanted to do, it just, because of circumstance, the other came to the fore first?

Douglas Stuart 2:45

Yeah. I think it was, I think it was, as you say, Brett, you know, I was a young kid that grew up in Glasgow, and I went to an inner-city school that had a fair amount of deprivation amongst all the kids that were there. I didn't grow up in a house with books. My family weren't big readers. I was never really encouraged to read. But when I was 16, two things happened. My mother sadly passed away, and the 250 kids in my year at school went down to about 12 kids. At 16, education becomes- Wow optional in Scotland, and so school just emptied. And so what was essentially, you know, just a very sort of frantic, frenetic place became very calm in my year, and I ended up being the only kid in my English class at age 16. And so I suddenly had these two English teachers, Mr. Arthur and Mr. Archibald, who'd spent years- just in crowd control and making sure kids got through the lesson and didn't hurt themselves or hurt someone else, suddenly had eight, 12 hours a week maybe, with just me, and there was nowhere for me to hide. And so they- Wow they sort of started to feed me literature. It was curriculum stuff. It wasn't anything off, off books, but they taught me how to read. They taught me how to focus. I was a young man that had no ability to sort of like to sit still in that kind of way. I had no peace in my life or inside myself. And I start to just devour books. But it's too late for me to study English at, at college level. And also, I think they were trying to sort of guide me towards success. They knew because my mother's death- Yeah had essentially orphaned me at 16, that I needed to find something that I could do, but also something that I could make some money at. And so I was a very arty kid, and they steered me towards textiles. I didn't know what the word textile meant, but I went to college to study textiles knowing that I could get a job on the far end manufacturing cloth. You know, I start college with that as my expectation, and when I come out of college, I'm just really lucky that I'm offered a job in fashion in New York. And in fact, my first job was designing for the menswear collection at Calvin Klein. Everyone's obsessed with Carolyn Bessette Kennedy at the moment, and I ended up- Right in that studio about two years after she unfortunately passed away. But, you know, at the end of the '90s, right around the millennium. And, and so I built a career in fashion. I worked for Calvin, for Ralph, for... I was at The Gap for 15 years of all places, way back when The Gap was the place to be. And I loved my job, but I was always a writer, I think. I was always a reader, and I wanted to be doing that. And so at the height of my fashion career, I started to write what eventually became Shuggie Bain, and it took me 10 years. It took me 10 years because that's how long it taught me to learn how to write and to fail and to rewrite and to throw it out and to start again, but also because it was such a pleasure just to be in this space- Mm that was private for myself, because everything in design was asking me almost as soon as I had the idea to manifest it. You know, that was American capitalism. The minute you had some kind of like design idea, you had to make something and make a lot of money for the company with it. And so writing was my private sanctuary. But now that we're talking about my third novel, it's almost inevitable that I was going to write about textiles and textile manufacturing. I kinda acted all surprised and coy when the book was coming together, but when I look back now, I think, "Oh, of course I was gonna do that. Of course that was in the cards since I was 16."

Brett Benner 5:56

It's so interesting because once you started writing and once you started out on Shuggie Bain, I'm sure there was a catharsis to all of this too, since, you know, some of it was very much centered or based around your own experience with your mother. But it was probably like floodgates opening, yes, in terms of- Mm-hmm then the next thing coming and the next thing coming, I imagine.

Douglas Stuart 6:16

Yeah, I think so. I mean, yeah. And, you know, I couldn't have anticipated the response that the book got in the world. And in fact, I don't even think my publishers could anticipate it, because it was a book that was, really thoroughly rejected across the board. I think, you know, I'd always believed it had been rejected 22 times. And then the night that I won the Booker, a journalist was asking me about the road to publication. And I started to tell them over Zoom because it was a pandemic, oh, you know, I was rejected 22 times. And my agent sort of cut in and said, actually, you were rejected 44 times. We just stopped telling you. And so, and I was like, fair enough, I wasn't coping. But, you know, so I think everything has come a little bit as a surprise. I didn't know the book would do what it would do. It would reach people in California. I mean, amazing to me. But also that sort of everything coming beyond it has been, yeah, I think in a lot of ways I've been waiting my whole life to arrive at that moment and sort of working towards it, but also just surprised by it too, I think.

Brett Benner 7:16

Yeah, for sure. I think it's such an interesting trajectory between your three books. And I, listen, I know they're not actually connected. They're not a trilogy, I would say. Although there is a through line to them because, and I also, I wonder sometimes if it's almost like your personal journey of going from like childhood to then adolescence or like young adult and to then this young man in this latest book. It does kind of seem like there's this tether between the three of them. Do you feel that?

Douglas Stuart 7:52

Yeah, I think you're probably right in that. I think maybe what it is is Scotland today is the most liberal country in all of Europe. It has some of the most socialist laws and things in place to combat poverty and inequality around sex and around sexuality and gender. And I'm incredibly proud of the country. But when I grew up there, it was the last, it was a deindustrializing nation and it happened really fast. But it also meant it had been a patriarchy for a long time. And, you know, the change happened like when I was a kid growing up in Scotland, I couldn't have believed that there would be marriage equality. I couldn't believe that there would be something where gay people felt respected and welcomed and a vital part of society as they are today. It was so totally homophobic, to be really honest. And, and so I think under that there's a real message of hope for any nation, any people,, that things can transform and transform very quickly. But my three novels I think are charting certainly, you know, Shuggie starts with a young boy, Mungo is a teenage boy, and John of John is now a man in his twenties, twenty-two, twenty-three. And I think it's fine to read almost like as a scale of, aging and evolution. But what's happening behind the books if you lay them end to end is a chun- a country is transforming. You know, when you see a country really on its knees because of Thatcherism in Shuggie Bain, and the working class are taken by surprise, at how heartless the government is at closing all industry so quickly. And then in Young Mungo, you have a nation where working class men have already given up because they understand in the way that communities in Detroit and Pittsburgh and Appalachia can feel that they're just expendable. They are, they are necessary casualties for a nation that doesn't care about them, right, and wants to just modernize in other ways. And now with, John of John, I think it's a nation that's just about to enter into the Blair years. It's the last moment of that. You know, it's the last moment of sort of patriarchy and the old way before the internet and technology and money and capitalism really sort of changes everything. And so I was kind of charting the nation, I think, because the nation's been the biggest influence in my formation. And from a distance in New York, I sort of look back and I, and I, I'm trying to come to terms with it, I think.

Brett Benner 10:03

Sure. Hmm, I wanna get in to the book more specifically too, but for our, for our listeners or for our viewers, can, can you give a synopsis or like an elevator pitch of the book?

Douglas Stuart 10:13

I n- I never can do that for my books, but I'll, I'll give it a go. Yeah, you know, it, John of John is set in about 1996, 1997. Our main character is called John Callum MacLeod, or Cal to everyone in the book, and he's just graduated art school on, in Edinburgh, just south of Edinburgh. And every week he calls home twice., He calls home to the island that he was raised on twice a week to worship with his father, who is a, a deacon in the Presbyterian Church. And just after graduation, he calls home for the weekly worship with his dad, and his dad says to him, it's time for you to come home." Your grandmother, who is his father's mother-in-law, not his father's mother, he says, "Your grandmother is unwell. You have to come home. She's your responsibility." And so just in that wonderful moment where every young person thinks they're going out into the world to make their own name, Cal is called home to the island. Now, the Outer Hebrides are off the northwest of Scotland. They're a beautiful archipelago of islands, but they've suffered from, like, really chronic depopulation through the 20th century, and they've lost about 45% of their population. And so Cal returns home to this small croft house, this farm, that sits by the sea, and is part of a settlement of only 26 people, where most of them are, are quite aged He comes home to a life that is full of broken relationships that he broke thinking he would never have to face them again because he was going out into the world and beyond. And I think he thinks he c- he's coming home with all of these unresolved things and all of these secrets, but as the book goes on, we learn that his father and also his grandmother, who is this profanity-loving, fun-loving, full of humor- irreverent woman, big, fleshy, great-grandmother, is also keeping some secrets. I think it's a story about family, it's about care, it's about duty, it's about inheritance. What do we physically inherit from our family, and is it worth sticking around for? But also, what have we inherited in terms of their secrets and their traumas and their views on the world? And, and I think that's it. Yeah, it's a family of sheep farming and, and tweed weavers and the return of a prodigal son, except he's not the only one with a story. How was that as my elevator pitch? Yeah, I loved

Brett Benner 12:17

that. That, I was gonna say, that was, that was excellent. So clearly if that's your worst, you're, you're doing fine. Had you... Like I know you spent time, in the, is it the Hebrides? Am I pronouncing that correctly?

Douglas Stuart 12:27

Mm. Yeah.

Brett Benner 12:29

You, you spent time there for research. So my, I have two questions. Had you ever been there before you started researching this?

Douglas Stuart 12:34

Never. Never, yeah.

Brett Benner 12:35

So what made you, what made you think like, "Okay, I want to go here and this is gonna be the setting of this book"?

Douglas Stuart 12:40

Yeah, I think it was, I think it was a lot of things. I think when I look back, it was sort of in the, on the cards and the stars, I think it was going to happen. Yeah. Part of that was the textile connection. But I, it, I'd actually begun to write- Uh, John of John before Shuggie was published. And it takes about a year and a half for a novel to publish, and it's a very anxious time, especially when it's your debut. You have lots of dreams, but you have lots of fears. And because I'd also put my fashion career on hiatus while I was waiting, I was very worried about, like, what was going to come next. And so in order to deal with that time I had, I thought, "I'm gonna start my next novel." And I sort of said to my husband, "I have an idea that I wanna go to the Outer Hebrides," 'cause I'd never been. You know, I, I was an inner city kid, and I hadn't actually seen much of Scotland. And in fact, when you often meet Americans, they would say to me, "Oh, I love Scotland. Have you ever been to Skye? Have you ever been here or to Lewis?" And I would say, "No, I've, I've never been." And so I felt a little bit of envy as well, and I thought, "Well, if I go and spend some time on the islands, perhaps there'll be a story or a novel there, but mostly I'll just get to know my own country a little bit better." And so my husband totally co-signed that idea because he was sick of looking at me and my anxiety, waking up every morning and being like, "Have I done the right thing leaving a fashion career?" And, and he was just like, "Yes, great idea." So I went for 12 weeks. I knew two people. It's a, it's a chain of islands, starts with an i- a tiny island of about 70 people, at the bottom called Vatersay, goes all the way up to Harris Lewis at the top. And I just traveled. I knew only two people, and I would... You know, I just rented different little houses, little cottages or rooms as I was going, and I was sort of just absorbing what the islands were. Um, and I found that people were very willing to talk to me. You know, they didn't know, I wasn't anybody at that point. They didn't know who I was. They just checked. They said, "You're not a journalist, are you?" And I said, "No, no, no, no." And then once I'd cleared that with them, they would tell me whatever I wanted to know. But I was going from settlement to settlement and traveling up the islands, and one of the things that struck me was You know, everyone would tell me about their little village, and a village was often just maybe 12 houses and, you know, 30 people total. It was very small. And there was always like a bachelor or a spinster, a man or a woman who had never married, or a couple or several. And I was listening to the story of everybody, and it was very, you know, it was lovely to hear, but I was listening to this for a couple of weeks. And I was asking, "Well, why do you think that farmer never married?" And the story was, "Well, they missed their moment," is what they would say. And I felt very sad about that. The idea that in a very sort of rural place with not a big population, unless you find that person, you just will never find the person. And I thought, oh, that's a great basis for a novel. But I was listening to it for about four weeks, and I was sitting at this woman's kitchen table, and she was telling me about the people in her own settlement. And I said, "Well, of course, some of them must be gay." Not meaning specifically them, but just some of these bachelors. And she went, "Oh, no, no, no, no," like this. And she was so... She wasn't cruel, she wasn't homophobic, but she was shocked that I would even think that. And I thought, oh, I just knew some of them had been gay. Some of these men and women who had never had the chance to marry, I knew they had been, and I just thought, oh, there's the novel. You know, it's not about a son returning home, it's about the home he returns to and the people that have been stuck in place and not able to, to be their true selves.

Brett Benner 15:55

Yeah, I w- I, I wondered about that specifically. I was wondering if when you were m- meeting the islanders, if anyone would've, and of course, they wouldn't have not known who you are, but if just in conversation they would've said that they were gay. I was so curious- Mm-hmm to see if anybody ever vocalized that. And it's an, it's an interesting thing to hear just that reaction that that woman had, because that speaks to so much of kind of what takes place in the book in a lot of ways.

Douglas Stuart 16:19

The islands are very diverse. They have all the world and all of its benefits and its problems there today. It's not a, it's not a place lost to the mists of time, although it is quite far from the mainland, and you have to be very intentional going. You, there's nothing casual about getting there or getting away from there. But one of the things that makes the islands so fascinating is they're the last stronghold of a very conservative Calvinism. Mm. Really, truly, it is a minority church on the islands, but its influence is so pervasive that everybody sort of feels the effect of it, whether you're of the faith or not. And, you know, the people are gorgeous and kind and generous and community-based, but I would say their path to God is a hard one, you know, that they don't negotiate with scripture. They believe it is the the infallible word of God, and that we are born in sin and we're all destined for hell. We are going to damnation, and only certain of us will be chosen for predestination to be saved by the Lord. And so that's quite a hard path to, you know, to the afterlife and to God. But that was the sort of thing that really sort of stood out to me when I was asking about queerness, and it wasn't... With this woman, it wasn't that she believed that there was any... You know, there was no homophobia in her, but there was a complete erasure. We didn't exist because we were so far outside of scripture. And I just thought, "Oh, that's, that's really fascinating." But as you say, when I was first talking to them, they were very, um... You know, whatever you say there, even if it's a banality or something very kind or feels flippant that we would just toss out on the mainland or in a big city, they have to live with the consequence of that sentence for, like, decades. And so even if you say something you just think is a very throwaway thing, you know, not being critical about a neighbor or a community, just sort of a thing, you know, "She likes to dance," you know, about your neighbor, the neighbor might take that the wrong way, and so people are very guarded about their words. And so even when I was interviewing them, I would find I would have to be talking to them for, like, two hour or two and a half hours before we could even get beyond the sort of the very general shared history thing. Um, and only when I was there, like, for a long period of time would guards start to come down and would people say, "Well, actually, this is quite difficult," or, "This is a problem," or, or that. But up until then, they were very cautious with words.

Brett Benner 18:33

Interesting. Did they ever question your faith?

Douglas Stuart 18:35

Yeah, sure, but I was raised Church of Scotland, so I'm the more sort of moderate side of that. You know, Scotland is a mostly Protestant nation, and I was Catholic mother, Protestant dad, so I was already on that sectarian fault line, which was a big deal in Glasgow in the '70s and '80s. But, you know, yeah, they, they did. I guess they questioned it, but because I knew the general church, I was sort of allowed into the more conservative branch of it.

Brett Benner 19:00

Interesting. It, the whole setting of your book reminded me so much of, my husband's family has a, has a place on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. Are you familiar with it?

Douglas Stuart 19:11

Mm-mm. Uh, uh, only because of the Hebridean connection

Brett Benner 19:15

Well, it has the largest Scottish Gaelic-speaking community outside of Scotland, and there's a Gaelic university there as well. Yeah. But the remoteness of it, and it's a very similar thing

Douglas Stuart 19:25

Yeah. We, Scotland shares, the Hebrides share a real affinity with the people of sort of Cape Breton and the, the east- Hmm coast of Canada because during the, you would know about the Highland and Island clearances where essentially wealthy landowners drove people off their land in order to raise sheep. They realized that these subsistence farmers weren't as profitable as sort of just letting sheep have all the land. Hmm. And so they displaced hundreds of thousands of families. They burnt houses down, they evicted people, they made them homeless. And a lot of what the people did, the Scottish people did, is they ended up in Canada and often were hardy enough, the only people that could almost tame the east coast of Canada. And so that's why there's, like, still a really close affinity there. But in the novel, part of the reason why the family live on the east coast of Harris, Harris is a beautiful island, but it's an island almost of two sides. The east coast, the island itself is made of this almost lunar bedrock, which is, has a very, very inches only deep layer of dirt on the top of it, so you can't actually plant very much because it's just rock.

Brett Benner 20:26

Oh, no.

Douglas Stuart 20:26

But then the west coast is millennia of, sand and shells and just the most beautiful beaches, which also have these, like, riots of wildflowers and the maheer it's called. It's like this almost pasture land. But the pasture land was cleared, which was great for farming, for sheep, and anybody that remained was actually driven on to live on the rocks. And so that's- Wow part of the story that connects it with Canada because the people that remained, like the McLeods in my book, stayed, but everybody else was sent to Glasgow or Edinburgh or Canada. And so there's a, there's a real connection there. You're right.

Brett Benner 20:59

So who did the story first start with for you? Was it John or was it his son?

Douglas Stuart 21:02

It was the son, yeah. I'd written a short story that ended up in The New Yorker called The Englishman, and it was about- Okay it was sort of around that time, and it was about a young man who answers a personal ad in a magazine, that's looking for a house boy, and he leaves the island. He's just finished college, and he ends up in London working for this man where he's taking care of the house for him, this older gentleman. But it is very clear to any reader that they both understand this is not what the request or the job is, and they're both sort of pushing it to see how far it can get to. And I'd started it there, and I just thought, "Oh, this is an interesting character. I want to keep writing about him." And so it sort of came from there. But they all sprung up really quickly. They, they came together. They came almost as a unit Um, and you know, Cal is the twenty-two-year-old son, and then John is his father in his 40s. We don't know where Cal's mother is, but she has left behind the grandmother, Ella, who's in her 60s, and whose house and farm it really is, whose croft it is. But Ella is also sort of an outsider in the place because she, we learn through her backstory that she was, grew up in Glasgow, and so she's a transplant. She got married and came to the islands. But even 50 years on, she's seen a little jokingly, a little seriously as a newly arrived, they call it, which is just letting you know that we know your ancestors don't come from here, that you've blown in from somewhere else. And so there's a great affinity between Cal and his grandmother because they both kind of feel on the outside of things a little bit. But they came sort of as a family, as a unit, it sort of arrived at the same time.

Brett Benner 22:39

And I know you, you talked about just the time period of the three books, but there's this section that you talk about with Cal, and it said, "He was raised to be fearful of intimacy. It was a fear seeded through scripture and nourished by the horrors he saw on the evening news, all those biblical images of gaunt, sunken-eyes men covered in sores and dying alone." And I was so curious if part of this time period for you Was critical too because of the AIDS crisis and probably the effect it would have had on him

Douglas Stuart 23:08

Yeah. I mean, Cal would be, I mean, he might be a year or two older than me if we, if he was real and we'd be contemporaries. And so it was drawing so much on my own experience. You know, I spent a lot of my young life as a gay man, my like teens, my late teens and my twenties being very fearful of sex. I mean, I came up in the generation where sex was death and, you know, by then we knew about safe sex and we knew about, um, sort of what we could do to be safe, but we'd still lived through losing all of those every night on the evening news. We'd lived through losing that whole generation of gay men and I was old enough to also see the government's response to it, how they didn't care and they were baffled and they were heartless and it was the gay men's fault. And then suddenly it was everybody's problem and we had to figure it out. And then suddenly Madonna, you know, brings such visibility to it and gay rights activists. And so I'd seen all of it and then suddenly I arrive in my own manhood, you know. I'm 18 in 1992 and so I'm in my prime and it's, or '94, um, I'm in my prime and it's right at the tail end of it. And so in a way it affected my entire sex life as a young man and also affected my enjoyment of it and my expectations of it. And I thought I drew that for Cal, but also for him, he has been raised to think that anything that's not sex between a man and wife, you know, even premarital sex between men and women is absolutely wrong. It's sin in the absolute. And so his enjoyment of sex would be really stilted, um, because he feels it's all very wrong. And he says that, you know, the, the church members took no comfort in seeing these images on the news of these men with the, with the sores. But there was a sort of a, you know, they took no pleasure in it, but there was a comfort in a way that God meant what he said, that the wages of sin is hell on earth. You know, because that's really what we believe in that, in that form of Calvinism. You will get the profits of your sin if you sin like that. And so in a way I think there was a sort of, well, God means it, it is going to be a hard life. And so yeah, Cal sort of pulls from my own experience with coming up in the era of AIDS and then also the church pushing down too.

Brett Benner 25:18

Was the church a big, for you, was your family, in your family, was it, was it a, a, a, a intense thing as you grow up?

Douglas Stuart 25:26

Not in the same way as for Cal because I was, um, I sort of fell between the mattresses would be the best-

Brett Benner 25:32

Yeah

Douglas Stuart 25:33

way to describe it because my mother was Catholic, my dad was Protestant and so they were forever fighting over how I should be raised in it that almost I got away with a lot. But all my family rituals were Catholic, all the high holidays and things like that, but all my education was Protestant. And so for me in Glasgow it became much more about, religion became much more about what tribal identity did I have? What group of boys did I run with? What football team did I support? Or what bar would I drink in? That kind of thing rather than something that was in my my DNA. Like, church wasn't part of who we were. We were pretty secular, I would say. But there is something, you know, we felt even though it's a minority church, that sort of staunch Presbyterianism has a huge effect on the larger Scottish psyche. You will know about sort of how nihilistic we can be as young men sometimes. You know, we receive a lot of information from England that says we are owned by another country, that our political vote doesn't matter, that our right to determine our own future, don't worry about it because Westminster will take care of all of it. And so there can be a thing with youth in Scotland where we kind of give up. But then also receiving from the north that idea of, like, you're born in sin and you're going to hell, and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't pray your way out of it. You cannot apologize at the last minute. You cannot ask for salvation. God will choose some, and he will not choose the rest. The vast majority are going to go to the very burn-y place. And so throughout that affects all of our psyches, you know, about how much we can care, how much we can control, and what is it worth. And so I've seen those two poles have a big effect on my peers, on the boys I went to school with, even though we weren't, Presbyterian ourselves.

Brett Benner 27:10

Did you keep up with any of them?

Douglas Stuart 27:11

Yes. More from college, I think, um, but less from school because school ended. They all left before I left, and so- Sure that was sort of, we didn't get to be adults together.

Brett Benner 27:22

I'm so curious if in writing this book, because your father left when you were so young, if you found this more challenging writing about a father and his son or if it was kind of liberating in a way?

Douglas Stuart 27:33

Yeah, it was liberating. It was also rewarding. I think I wrote this book to imagine what a great love between a father and son was, because I didn't have anything like that with my father, and my father was never as noble or as good as John, you know. What I knew of him, certainly the stories I heard afterwards, he wasn't like that. And so I wanted to write this story about a father and son who love each other very deeply. But because they're both carrying secrets, they can't quite connect, and they take that lack of connection as a... They start to resent it, right? They think, oh, the father thinks, "You don't respect me. You don't listen to what I have to say. You don't want this world I've built for you." And the son thinks, "Well, you don't care about me. You won't let me have my own life, and I can't be myself around you." And so in a way, the novel's about how much they love each other, but how they just cannot connect. And the reason why they can't connect is because they won't tell each other the emotional truth, or because they can't for reasons that the reader will discover. But it was also, as much as it was about sort of fathers and sons together, I was raised in a world by really strong, powerful women who absolutely ran the world, but they ran it from the back, Brett. You know, they had to sort of, they had no line of control to anything. Everything was a patriarchy. All labor, the house that you lived in because it came with the labor, the recreation, the church, the heavy drinking that might happen was all masculine, and it was all controlled by men. And yet in my family, the women ran the world. They just couldn't be visibly seen to be doing it. And so the book for me became about like, you know, how committed men would be to not facing the emotional truth, to pretending they didn't see certain things, and yet the women had to be in that world and, like, carry all of it, carry all of the knowledge and all of the sort of understand the men and manipulate the men and could not control them, but save themselves from the worst of themselves. And it was really sort of a homage to the men and the women that I grew up around in the, in the mainland. Yeah. And especially Ella, the granny, I mean, she was my granny and my granny's friends. When I'd started writing the book, I thought they would all be Presbyterian from the island, but the men were so stoic and so quiet that I couldn't introduce a Presbyterian granny, a very staunchly island granny, because I felt she might be a little sharp or a little brittle. And so I needed something in the recipe to counterbalance the men, and also to be like an angel on Cal's shoulder that was corrupting in a way, or that was fun and irreverent and just would s- Yeah wasn't afraid of men or the church. And so that's where I thought, "Who is that?" And I thought, "Oh, it's absolutely my granny and all the women that my granny would play cards with and drink lager with on a Friday night when my grandad was at the pub." You know? And so that's where she came from.

Brett Benner 30:16

And she's so, she's awesome and so hilarious. I mean, everything that comes out of her mouth, she's just great. Do you think that John In Cal's return, do you think he suspects his son is gay?

Douglas Stuart 30:28

Yeah, I think he, I think he always sort of knows it. I don't think he wants to face it, but I think he would know- Right in his heart of heart. And there's a line in the book that says, where Ella says, not to spoil anything, but she says, "How do you tell a man who hates himself that his son is made in his image?" Yeah. And that for me became one of the keys in the novel. You know, that's what I'm saying about, like, not wanting to face the emotional truth. Because as Cal is trying to search and come to terms with who he is and sort of find, find his own identity in the world, you know, his father in that way, where masculinity is expressed very narrowly because they're working men, but also because they're in the church, and what a good clean living man is is a very narrow expression. Between those two things, Cal feels really suffocated by his father's expectations. And so he's just trying to defend the castle of himself in a way by sort of, like, acting out a little bit, but also by pushing boundaries. And yet John also has his own secret. I think it comes out at the sec- end of the second chapter. John might have a love. He might have a love affair. You have to read the book to see. But they just can't, like, get together and talk about it because it's so outside of scripture. It's so outside of what's acceptable.

Brett Benner 31:37

Yeah, it's fascinating, too, for Cal being this gay man in a, in an environment that's so, overtly masculine, and the recognition of that, but also for me, and I think I saw some of this in this character of what am I putting out? What am I projecting that someone's going to potentially pick up on, and what does that mean in the larger context of something? Especially when you're coming back to a community where he's gone out in the world and really found much more of who he is, and then trying to fit this version of who he's becoming into something of what he's expected to be. I think that's, I think that's so, uh, universal, I think for so many, so many people generally, but, but especially in regards to sexuality, I think is such a huge thing.

Douglas Stuart 32:29

Yeah. Yeah, I think even straight men spend far too much energy trying to make sure their expression is acceptable. Um, you know, I think of my own brother. 100%. And I think of how they hold these really narrow standards together when it would be better for them alone just to smash it. But John just cannot smash it, you know. Cal, um, one of the things Cal faces is he has been dating, uh, his, uh, best friend's younger sister, who's a lovely girl. Her name is Isla. And when they were younger, before he went to college, it suited him because she was too young for anything to come of it. And in the modern parlance, she acted almost as a beard or a decoy for him. She allowed him, in the eyes of all the other men, because she was his sweetheart, to be almost straight acting or straight passing. And I think he thought that was fine when he was a kid, but he wasn't expecting to come right home after college. And when he arrives back home, Isla is there, and Isla believes there was some kind of tacit promise made between them. And so where is, where is it now? And of course, now they're adults. It takes on a whole other level of seriousness because it could end up meaning marriage and kids and everything else. And he almost has to sort of worm out of it and, and you know, and, and put her off. And, and she's very worthy of his love. She's smarter than he is. She's funnier. She's brighter. But he's been using her, you know, to sort of like fit in with the flock, as he calls it. You know, she's a, she's this magical fleece that he can wrap around his shoulders. And I think, you know, that's a very true thing. I think, I hate to say it, but I think especially when you're in a very conservative church, I think there's lots of men who find themselves in marriages and in relationships because the most important thing to them is fitting in with that community. And I think, you know, if we allowed people to be who they were, there'd be a lot less of that, you know. I can't tell you how many people I know of faith who find out later on in life or confront later on in life that they should never have gotten married, they should never have built this life.

Brett Benner 34:26

No, and, and, and the, and the other lives that get run asunder because of it. It's, it's just, it's, it's incredibly tragic. You know, I love, I love the whole, one of the whole themes of this book about returning to the place you grew up and as the person you are now, and, and also living your true self in your home. I'm so curious, if, if, home for you, is it the place you leave or, or is it the place you create?

Douglas Stuart 34:50

I'm wrestling with that all the time. I don't know. I think, you know, I think I have so many homes. I feel like part of my problem is,, I can never quite go home to Scotland because when I was a young man, I felt very unloved by the place. Yeah. And now I feel very loved by it and very accepted, but I can't bring my kid self home. I can't make it all all right for him. And so I think much of what my writing has been about has been about finding out what home means, but also finding out how do you belong in the only place you make sense, when that, when you feel like you don't belong there. And of course, belonging asks for conformity often. It asks you- Mm-hmm you're allowed to believe you belong in a place as long as you actually fit in. But what if you don't fit in? Like, what if you're not ready to conform and to be like everybody else? And so home's really complex for me. I don't know that I'll ever figure it out, Brett.

Brett Benner 35:40

Yeah. No, I understand that. And it's also an interesting, I find, as people age and the, the kind of meaning that it takes on, it just takes on a different feeling. And you watch people that as they, say, they have children and they have their own families, and they go back to where they started from because they want, whether it's nostalgia or whether they feel like they're missing something or whether they feel they just have to go back. And sometimes it's circumstance, of course, if we're taking care of parents or whatnot. Mm-hmm. But I do notice so many people, as they get older, are looking for that thing that they're missing out on, even if they can't necessarily define what it is they feel they're missing out on, if that makes sense.

Douglas Stuart 36:17

Yeah. And I think the world has changed so much, and so I think if we'd had the same childhoods today in a place, we would have different childhoods. And I think that's- Yeah part of what my generation is wrestling with. It's not only that you can't physically go back in place, but you can't go back in time. Like, the time's changed- Right so utterly that now when I go home to Scotland, I almost don't recognize it sometimes because it's a- Right country utterly transformed. And so I think that leaves a lot of us feeling like exiles or, or sort of lost in time and space without a sense of belonging. I think that's a very valid queer experience for lots of people. Even if you come from Cincinnati, you know. I think the world- Right has, has sort of changed. And so yeah, I think a lot of gay people of our generation is wrestling with Well, you know, I can never go home, and where is it? And it doesn't even exist on this temporal plane anymore.

Brett Benner 37:05

Yeah. No, I agree with you. So I read somewhere you were saying you were, you were kind of ready to move beyond the boundaries of where you had had written before- and these kind of places in the past. So what would be next? And I'm not even asking you to be specific, but, like, where do you see yourself going next, or what kind of, where kind of places?

Douglas Stuart 37:22

I don't know. I honestly don't know. I'm not trying to avoid it. I think I'm just trying to... You know, the book is about to publish, and I'm trying to hold myself- Yeah to get just if I can survive that. Yeah. But I think I feel sort of finished with Scotland. I feel, like, finished with my business with Scotland for right now. I think those three novels and that sort of panoramic look at a country behind the characters and the different stories makes me just feel like I've said what I want to say. Um, and three feels like a nice number. It feels like a triptych. It's not a trilogy, but it's just a sort of loose collection of things. Yeah. And so I don't know. I'm excited to see where I go next and also a little daunted by it. But there's so many. You know, I've been an American, for 30 years almost now. I've lived in- Wow New York more, longer than I've lived in Scotland, and so I think I might have a New York novel in me, but I'm not sure.

Brett Benner 38:07

You are a New Yorker effectively

Douglas Stuart 38:09

now. I'm an American writer, which people are always freaked out about, because everyone hears the accent and they think, "Oh, he's Scottish." But, I mean, just about every word I've written has been written in, in New York, so I don't know what that makes me.

Brett Benner 38:20

Did you learn any Gaelic as you were going through? 'Cause you didn't know Gaelic before you started the book, did you?

Douglas Stuart 38:24

Very basic, just hello and goodbye. Yeah. Yes, I learned a lot of Gaelic. And actually we say Gaelic in Scotland. Gaelic, just for your listeners, is Irish. Same spelling, but we pronounce Gaelic, probably in Canada too. But yeah, I did. I did. I'm a terrible Gaelic conversationalist because I've got nobody to talk to in New York. But it was fun to just have the dictionary and, and also to sort of like dig into, you know, there's so much. One of the things in the novel is the characters speak Gaelic to each other, but I had to translate it into English. And often if I translated it word for word, you would think I was, you know, the meaning becomes a little skewed in the way-

Brett Benner 38:59

Oh, yeah

Douglas Stuart 39:00

you know, you don't say, "I'm hungry." You say, "I have hunger upon me." "The hunger is upon me," is how you would say it. And so I couldn't literally translate them a lot of the times because the meaning can be so different as well. It was such a, such a pleasure.

Brett Benner 39:12

Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. Well, Douglas, this has been so wonderful. I'm, I'm, I'm so excited for people to experience Him and Them and this world. It, it is, it's absolutely beautiful as, as are all your novels. And, this has just been a treat. Buy independent, everyone, if you can, but get the novel. It is really wonderful, and congratulations on, on just another fantastic book.

Douglas Stuart 39:38

Oh, thank you, Brett, and thank you for being one of the very first readers and for, you know, for just, for everything you do in the literary community. I appreciate it.

Brett Benner 39:46

That's very sweet. Thanks. Thanks again, Douglas. And if you've liked this episode or other episodes of Behind the Stack, please consider liking and subscribing so that you never miss an episode. Also, what would be really helpful to me is if you can go to your podcast platform of choice and give the show five stars. That will absolutely help the show be put in front of more people who might be interested in listening. I'll be back next week with another episode, and in the meantime, you can always find me @brettsbookstack on Instagram, YouTube, and Substack. Thanks for listening.