Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart on the isolation of secret-keeping

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Show your support for a public radio that is by the people for the people at Donate.npr.org and thanks. This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. You may have read my guess books. You may have worn the closely designed. Douglas Stewart's first novel "Shuggy Bain" won the Book of Prize which is one of the world's top literary awards.

Much of it was written when Stewart was working in the fashion industry, designing clothes for popular brands like Calvin Klein and Benanary Public. Stewart wouldn't have predicted any of this from what his life was like growing up in a working class neighborhood in Glasgow, Scotland, in the 80s. He was raised by a single mother who was addicted to alcohol. Things weren't much better at school where he was relentlessly bullied.

When he came to understand that he was gay, he didn't know anyone else who was. The novel "Shuggy Bain" tells a story very similar to Stewart's own childhood. Stewart has described his second novel "Young Mungo" as a story about the dangers of first love between two young working-class men in Glasgow and about masculinity, conformity, and falling in love. In our Book Critic Marine Caragans review, she wrote,

"It's hard to imagine a more disquieting and powerful work of fiction will be published anytime soon

about the perils of being different." Douglas Stewart has a new novel called "John of John" that explores things of faith, obligation, and how isolating secrets can be. It's said on a fictional island in Scotland's Heberties, in a very old-fashioned conservative community of weavers. There were two John's in the story, a father and his son, the son is known as Cal. Cal is just graduated textile school in Glasgow, and reluctantly returned home.

When his father insists, he needs Cal's help to take care of Cal sick grandmother. Cal is gay, and keeps it a secret from everyone, including his father. But as we learned early in the story, the father, who is the deacon of his church, is also secretly gay. Father and son are keeping the same secret from each other. Douglas Stewart, welcome to Fresh Air and Congratulations on your new book.

Can you describe how you landed on the premise that both the father and son are gay,

“and they're not only keeping it a secret from everyone else, they're keeping it a secret from each other?”

Yes, I mean, I am a Scottsman who grew up in Glasgow, but I had never been to the outer hebrides before.

You know, they're quite far from the mainland and it takes some effort to get there. But in 2019, when I was thinking about writing a new novel, I decided I was going to go to the archipelago of islands and just explore it and see if a story emerged. And I realized that every little settlement I went to, that when I was talking to someone I would sit at a kitchen table and have tea and pancakes or whatever they baked for me, it was, you know, all the islanders were very hospitable. But I was hearing about their settlement and the people in the village and there was always a bachelor or some spinsters who had never, who had never married and for quite a conservative Christian place that seemed a little unusual.

And I asked everybody, you know, well, why did so and so not marry? Why didn't they ever sort of take a partner and the answer was often, will they miss their moment was what was said? And I came to learn in rural places, you know, the window to find someone to love could be quite short, quite narrow. And that just really sparked my imagination and I said just very casually one day, well, and of course some of them might be gay and that makes it harder to find love. And the woman I said it to said sort of reared back and said, "Oh no, no, no, that's not so, that's not possible."

And of course I just knew historically that some of them must have been maybe not the people we were talking about, but some of these people that had never found love.

And that was really the moment that the novel came to life. I had gone thinking it was about the return of a prodigal son and then I realized it wasn't about that at all. It was about the people he had left behind. What does being gay mean to the father, who's a weaver, who's never left the island and doesn't even want to leave, he's the deacon of his church, and often quotes the Bible, compared to the son, who left the island for art school, and returns reluctantly to the island when his father calls him back.

“Yeah, I think they're definitely men of a different generation, although tradition is very strong in the setting of the novel.”

And for John, because he has very close descriptor, he has part of a church that believes in a very traditional conservative viewpoint, any sex outside of one man, one woman, inside of a marriage is absolutely taboo. And so he has come up in that environment and has remained in the fictional settlement of the family, his whole life.

And also, in many ways, gay is a social identity. It is about a community and an outlook in the world. It's not just about a sexual identity. And so for John, he has no way to access a social identity. All he is is he has homosexual desires. He is attracted to other men. With his cowl is, you know, a youth in the 90s, and he went to the mainland, he managed to go to college for four years. He is finding a country Scotland at the time, would be transforming utterly.

You know, it had been a very working class, heavy industry, patriarchy for centuries, probably. And now we're finding its deindustrializing, it is changing, it's becoming incredibly liberal very quickly. And so he sees much more hope in the world as a young gay man and much more acceptance.

But the problem is, is in that wonderful moment where we all leave home for the first time and we think we're going to get to step out into the world and become our own people far from our families.

He has called home to take care of his sick grandmother and he finds himself exactly back where he started. So you grew up in a neighborhood in Glasgow where it was working class, like very, like masculine. You were an outsider because you were seen as gay, even though you hadn't told anybody that you were gay. There were no gay bars, there was no gay culture, there were no gay publications.

“What did it mean to you, or what lack of meaning did you find growing up so isolated?”

Yeah, I mean, in fact, I didn't have any understanding that I was gay for most of my young life. I was sort of pointed out as being different to the other boys around me because masculinity was expressed in a very narrow way. You know, we were all sons of hard working fathers who did very difficult dangerous jobs and so men were meant to be a very specific sort of way. You know, very brave, very strong, hard working, but also quite emotionally distant because I think if you were going to start talking about your feelings, one of the very first feelings you would have is this job is dangerous and underpaid and I don't want to do it anymore.

And so as a way of sort of coping with whether it was coal mining or ship building men became quite cut off even to themselves.

And you know, at five or six, I was quite an expressive young boy. I had too much to say for myself. I probably always have had.

And the other boys just sort of turned at me on mass and said, "What is wrong with you? Why are you like that?" And so I was just deemed as being too feminine, very, very young and that was before I had any sexual notions at all, but that sort of followed me all the way through my youth.

“And maybe feel very lonely in the only place I think I ever felt like I belonged, which has been a sort of through line and all of my work.”

Were you a church girl or was your mother a church girl? Actually, I had a really complicated relationship with religion when I was a child. I was actually what was essentially born into a mixed marriage. My father as Protestant, my mother was Catholic. And at the time that was deeply taboo. And so all throughout my life, I do sort of, you know, there was sort of confusion over what my spiritual upbringing should be. And all my family rituals were Catholic, but all my education was Protestant, and yet no one quite fully claimed me and so I was a little bit outside of religion.

It became a more pressing urgent matter for me when I became a teenager because often in the East End of Glasgow where I grew up, young boys would organize themselves into tribes and on the weekends they would get together and then they would fight the opposite tribe. And the tribe was often very loosely organized around religion, so there would be a group of Protestant boys versus a group of Catholic boys. But for me, from the age of 14 to maybe 16, I was going out every Saturday night and having pitch battles as a Protestant against the Catholics.

But then as soon as that was all over and we'd congratulate each other, and by the way, the fighting was fun, the young men enjoyed doing that. It wasn't just about violence in a negative sense. It was a way to sort of have a camaraderie as a hard thing to explain.

“But after having this pitch battle, when I felt like I was representing the Protestants, I would go home to my single mother who was a Catholic, and so it was all entirely pointless, I think.”

So you went to art school, you had shown some artistic talent, but you needed work.

So your teacher who had taken you under her wing advised me to go to art school and study textiles, and then you could have a trade, basically, or a craft.

So did you go to art school to become a weaver? Like what was the meaning of studying textiles when you went? In fact, when I was 16 and I was guided towards textiles, I couldn't quite tell you what the word textile meant.

And the answer to that is, I didn't read books as a kid, we didn't have any books at home, we didn't have access to them. It wasn't quite such an unusual thing because I think if I looked to the boys that grew up around many of them, also weren't reading either. But children also need a huge amount of peace in their lives in order to read both peace inside themselves and peace at home. And also at school to be honest, and I didn't have any of that because I was dealing with a single mother who was suffering with addiction, and then at school I was being bullied for being gay.

But two things happened when I was 16.

The first thing that happened was my mother died very suddenly one morning her addiction finally got the better over.

“And when I left for school in the morning she was fine when I came home at lunch time she was dead, and also at 16 school becomes optional for Scottish children you can leave if you want to.”

And so my year of about 300 kids went down to only 12 kids, and I found myself one of only 12 kids remaining in my year who were going to finish high school who were then going to go on to college hopefully. And I found myself in an English class where I was the only student who was just me and two English teachers, Mr. Arthur and Mr. Archibald. And suddenly they had eight hours a week with a student who was trying to pay attention, who was trying to understand how to read not just get through the exams, but trying to learn how to digest books and how to take in all their meaning.

And I tell you this because I suddenly realized that 1617 I would love to be a writer, I would love to study English literature. And that just wasn't going to be possible for me. I was a working class boy that grew up in a neighborhood of great deprivation. And I think my teachers rather than turning me away from English turn me towards something that I could make a living at.

That's an amazing story about being like one student with two teachers and just talking about, you know, just the theory talking about literature.

“I could see how you could fall in love with books that way, but how do that lead to textiles?”

Well, you know, it was wonderful to be around people who had this passion for a thing and they invested that passion in you. They saw that I couldn't go on to compete and study English literature at a university level. They, you know, I would have to be competing with children that would ultimately go to Oxford and Cambridge. And, you know, that had spent their whole life's their whole, all their youth around books and I just didn't have that. And so instead they guided me towards textiles without me really knowing what textiles was, but they saw a kid that wasn't really great academically,

but that wanted to achieve something someone who was creative and artistic, but needed to do something that ultimately could find employment on the far side of.

“And so I went to a very traditional textiles school and I was a weaver for a year.”

They let you sample all kinds of textiles and I was a printer, I was a weaver. And then ultimately I did my rotation into knitting, which sounds like a very sort of crafty thing where you sit with needles. But in fact, as a very industrial course, you do all you're knitting on these huge screaming knitting machines that are often computer operated. And I found knitting just to be really inspiring. It was, you know, you made this cloth, anything you could imagine in 3D you could make.

And we made really diverse things, we made fashion, we made clothing, we made interiors. But we also made things like car interiors, our automobile interiors, and we made sacks and vessels for inside the body with sort of microscopic knitting machines. And so it was a wonderful education, but my whole life, I felt like a writer that couldn't be a writer. In your new novel, John of John, the son studies textiles and becomes a weaver on this kind of isolated island and the heberties of Scotland. And at the time, and this is happening to so many people now, the thing that he studied in college has just become basically out of date.

You know, the textiles mills are closing, people aren't wearing the tweeds they used to wear. So he can't find a job either on the islands or, you know, where he went to school. So he joins his father on the one loom that they're allowed, which is interesting right there, there was this like one loom per family rule in the outer heberties at the time or at least on this island. Would you explain why? Yeah, you're right, everything at this time moves to the far east and nothing is made in the west and textiles as an industry is on its knees.

But there's a wonderful tradition on the outer heberties of making something called Harris tweed, and it was established as a sort of almost a socialist project, I would say, where each of the homes would have a loom behind the house in a shed.

You know, it is still made in that exact same way, even today.

“And now today it feels like such a rare thing to have something made by hand in place.”

And it's just the most remarkable thing, but cow returns from art school, as you say, and his father has always been a weaver.

And so he's almost gone to textile college couldn't find work and finds himself back working for his father anyway. When cow decides to go to textile school, his father doesn't really love the idea. There's a passage from your book I'd like you to read about that, because it shows off your writing and it also ties together. The father is very conservative version of Presbyterianism, and also his self-imposed homophobia because he secretly gave. Before the reading, I just want to remind our listeners that John is the father and cow is the son.

And Ella is cow's grandmother.

“John had a Presbyterian respect for education, but there was too much of the unknown about university life, and there was something about art schools that sent him into a moral panic.”

The notion of self-expression was antithetical to religious obedience, and the art schools seemed too liberal, the women too unfettered, and bent on their own pleasure. Ella had sat calm down and advised him that half a victory was still a victory, and so in the end he chose a modest technical school. It was the campus that was farthest from home but closest to his father's understanding of the world. The textile school was 40 miles south of Edinburgh, tucked away in the sleepy valleys of the Scottish borders.

The school had no desire to re-examine or reinvent. It came to be simply because there had been a practical need for generations of workers to learn how to make textiles and the correct historical manner. So you've no work can no woman to show for it. John could be blunt like this, not born from a meanness of spirit, but from a desire to speak the economical truth. Cal hesitated. John kept cutting his eyes towards him, awaiting his response. Cal wondered if now was the time to be honest with his father.

Part of him wanted to tell his father he was gay, if only to hurt him for demanding his return. Certainly, as deacon of their church, John could not be seen to be harboring such sin at home. If he told his father the truth, that he had no natural attraction to women, he wondered if John would send him away for good, and if this would be the last time they ever saw one another. But John took Cal's hesitancy the wrong way and he answered for him.

So all that money, four years, no woman, and no job.

I was top of my year dad, I got a first class with honors, it's not my fault the country's in the bin.

He wanted to tell his father about the Saudi state of the Scottish textile industry, how Pringle was all but Chinese owned, how barren it were, had been steadily shedding jobs, how an early thin was a milled town with no mills. But he saw the slump of his father's shoulders, the side of John's index finger thickened from decades of shunting the heavy bobbin. And so he sighed and he turned back to the sea. Thank you for reading that, I really like that passage.

And it shows how all encompassing the homophobia and the very conservative religious beliefs that the father has, how all of that, is used in an attempt to shape John's son, Cal's behavior. No one was telling you all that, were they? Well, in fact, you know, my father left my mother when I was about four years old, so my brother, my older brother, had to step into the father role in my family.

“You know, when I came out eventually at 17, my family were just very disappointed for me, I think, because they knew how hard the world was going to be on me.”

But my brother took it very personally because at the time he believed that masculinity was a learned thing, and so somehow he had failed in teaching me how to be a real man, how to be a heterosexual man. And so my sexuality wasn't something that I was innately born with, but in fact it was some failing and how he had raised me. And I felt terrible for him for that, you know, it took me many years to get him to understand that that wasn't the truth. Well, what a strange burden to carry to think that as a brother you didn't teach your younger brother masculinity well enough, and therefore he's gay and a total outsider.

I often think about people being homophobic, how they were fundamentally good people, but they just didn't know that that wasn't the way to be in the world.

“And I think that's something that's really changed now, but there were so many people that just didn't know that how the world really was, I suppose.”

My guest is Douglas Stewart, his new novel is called John of John. He won the Book of Prize for his first novel, Shuggie Bain.

We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross and this is Fresh Air. Hi, this is Molly C.V. Nusper, digital producer at Fresh Air, and this is Terry Gross, host of the show. One of the things I do is write the weekly newsletter, and I'm a newsletter fan. I read it every Saturday after breakfast. The newsletter includes all the week shows, staff recommendations, and Molly picks timely highlights from the archive. It's a fun read.

It's also the only place where we tell you what's coming up next week and exclusive.

So subscribe at WHY.org/Fresh Air and look for an email from Molly every Saturday morning. You grew up in a very female environment. Your mother was a single mother. She was addicted to alcohol, as were some of her friends. So when you'd come home from school, your mother was often drinking with some of her friends. Some of her female friends who were also drinkers. A lot of the men in the community were unemployed, so a lot of the men drank too much too.

“But was there the women drinkers different in any fundamental way than the men drinkers in the communities that they had with each other?”

Your mother did a lot of drinking at home with friends or in their homes. The men probably mostly went to bars away from the wife and kids. That's exactly it. Yeah, I think when men drink or when they have a problem, then it can be a very public thing, and we can forgive them for it. But there's an extra layer of stigma when a woman fails like that. And you know, so it's done very much at home. And at the family often times, certainly my family tried to sort of keep her home, mostly to protect my mother's reputation.

But I think, you know, alcoholism seems like a very individual problem, but in places where hope evaporates as a social problem. And so my mother often had friends and neighbors who would come and drink with her during the day.

And you know, sometimes this could be a huge amount of fun. It was never fun for me, but she would have a lot of fun.

And other times it would lead to great troubles. But as a kid, one of the strangest things that happened to me is, because I was with my mother almost all the time, you know, there was no other child care. I was sort of privy to this very private space of these women discussing life, you know, and they would talk about everything from their love affairs to their concerns about money, to their concerns about their children or their parents. And oftentimes they would talk about sex in a very graphic way, and I'm only a six, seven, eight year-old boy sitting in the corner sort of minding my mother. And I had this real front seat to the inner workings of sort of women being very unguarded because, you know, alcohol is a great leveler. It drops all, it drops all sort of social pretence.

“And often my mother would see me not as her child, but often as her friend, and so she would tell me things that I think mother should never tell children. But that energy comes in my novels. Now I'm, you know, at the time I hated it as a kid.”

But now as an adult man, I think how lucky I was in a way to know my mother is a woman to know her as an individual and not just the role of my mother, but to hear the romantic failures and the other concerns that were in her life. And as a writer now, I love to sort of be in that inner world in my novels and sort of just, yeah, just look at that domestic scene. I can't ask you to repeat what she, what you overheard about sexuality, can't, we can't talk about that on the radio. Yeah, you can't talk about it anywhere. It was often very vulgar and very frank and, you know, and, like I said at the time as a kid, I would be horrified and I would be scandalized and now as an adult, I feel, wow, how lucky you were to be in that room.

You grew up keeping a lot of secrets. I mean, I think you didn't want everybody to know that your mother was alcoholic. What life was like at home, how confusing and sometimes dangerous it could be, you had to keep a secret that you were gay. And she kept secrets from you and even, like, you know, hiding the alcohol, hiding, have used bottles of beer and alcohol. What would you do if you found those partially used bottles and cans? I mean, I think my whole childhood was about secrets on all sorts of levels, but, you know, my mother's drinking was a difficult thing to manage. I was sort of thrust into a caregiving role about the age of four, what I realized that my mother wasn't always be able to take care of me and I had to look after her.

And so, very much dependent on where I could judge where she was emotionally and what would come from those actions, but, yeah, sort of addiction was a central part of my childhood.

And, I mean, this is the point where I should say my mother was a wonderful woman and she was a wonderful mother. She was incredibly kind and incredibly generous, and I often say that addiction killed my mother, but I don't think as I age that that is true, I think what killed my mother was first of all poverty. And then the second thing was, she was a woman who had made a very traditional bargain that said, you don't need an education, if you leave school and you should marry the first man that you fall in love with, and you should have children and you will build a life together.

She eventually married my father, and when the sort of the country went into 25% unemployment under Margaret Thatcher, and when my father left her, you know, she found herself in a very desperate place, and so it was that sort of, you know, that upbringing, and then also the poverty that we found ourselves in that led to the addiction, and that's really the thing that killed her. But like you were saying before that your brother felt that masculinity has learned, and that he didn't do enough to teach you how to be masculine, and so your brother was at fault, and he felt very guilty. At the same time, you were feeling guilty that you weren't doing enough to save your mother from her addiction.

So it's not like your whole family were feeling guilty about things they shouldn't have had to feel guilty about.

“I think so, and I think that as a writer now that's become a through line in all of my work about when a family is disorganized or something's not working when a parent can't function or a brother acts out.”

How everybody else has to take on a role that wasn't theirs often in my novels and my first two, the siblings have to become parents, and the child has to become the parent, and even in John of John, we see a structure where the mother is gone for some reason, and so the grandmother has to almost become a mother. But the great tension is that we have John who is cows father living in a house with his mother-in-law, which I think would just be sort of very tense anyway, but it's certainly one of the leaf motifs of my work is about families trying to get through.

When we need to take another break here, so let me reintroduce you if you're just joining us, my guest is Douglas Stewart, whose new novel is called John of John, his first novel, Shuggie Bain, one Britain's highest literary prize, the Booker Prize.

We'll be right back after a short break, this is fresh air.

“What did you think masculinity meant when you were growing up when people made a clear that you weren't masculine enough?”

Yeah, they were, I always remember as a kid, you know, I was quite expressive, and I remember my brother buying a new shirt, and it was like a check shirt, and it was blue, overwhelmingly blue, but there was a tiny pink line in it, a deck, just tiny microscopic, and I remember I'm standing over it and saying, I can't wear that, that looks really, you know, that looks, he used the slur for it, and I just thought to myself, wow, men are really stuck here, you know, but they really have themselves in their own trap, and I was only like 12 or 13, but I just thought that's, this isn't sane.

When you were able to dress yourself, how did you dress and what did you want your clothes to say? I think one of the things that sort of made me very conspicuous to these other boys was the fact that my mother dressed me for all of my childhood is which is not unusual for children,

“but I do think there is comes a point where boys sort of rebel against that and want to be their own person and have their own hairstyle, and I never reached that point because I was so close with my mother,”

so when I look back on photos now, I almost look like the husband, my mother wishes she had, you know, I have very carefully parted hair, I look at least 30 years older than I am when I'm like, you know, eight years old, and I look back on it now, and I'm just so out of time with all the other boys who were a little bit sort of shabby and knock about and doing that, and so my own sense of style when I get to fashion college and I start to develop, it comes very slowly for me, but it also comes in the mid 90s when people are finally really playing with gender and an interesting way,

when we start to hear things like unisex and and biguous and things like that, and so I take all opportunities to sort of blend gender and really go through about six years, what I'm playing with that, the things that it oppressed me as a child. Once you figured out your gay and once you got out of the community that you grew up in and there really was gay culture and gay bars, and you started going to them, how did you feel about being at bars, being at places where, you know, consumption revolved around alcohol,

I once had this conversation with the great Irish writer, Colin Toybean, who is a little older than I am and he said, "Oh, I used to go to gay bars in Glasgow when you would have been a child," and he said,

"They were always under the railway station and they always felt like they were full of sort of Haiti, sweaty self-loathing, presbyterians."

And I felt that was a part of gay history in my city that I didn't access.

“Yeah, I always, I think, felt ill at ease and gay bars, even when I came of age and I was 18.”

And mostly because I was looking to have an emotional connection with people or an intellectual connection, and bars are about drinking and dancing, as you say, and I was looking more to make friends and just a feel like I wasn't so invisible in the world. One thing that was really formative to my youth was there used to be a magazine that was like a teen pop magazine. And then the back of that magazine that would be personal ads, other young gay youth from across the country, all across Britain, who were placing personal ads and then you would respond to them and you would end into a correspondence with this person.

And it was, you know, sometimes it would turn into dating, sometimes it might turn into sex. But for the most part, it was just long-form correspondence, it was letter-writing, you would write, and you would wait, and then you would write again. And in a way, I was looking at those letters the other day, and I come across almost as, like, a bronti-sister house sort of sweet and innocent, they are.

“You know, it's like, tell me about the weather, where you are, and explain your family to me, and, you know, have you seen anything good on television?”

And when I think about modern dating now, about how it gets to sex quite quickly, I think. You know, I look back on that time, and I feel very lucky to have been in this sort of letter-writing phase.

And actually, that was the first time that was how I fell in love. That was how I met my first love, was through these personal ads.

And then the next person, I thought I was falling in love with, told me he was a 22-year-old man, and then he turned out to be 48. And so cat fishing is a very old art form, I think. Well, how did you react when you showed up and found him? I mean, I was devastated and sort of horrified. And one of the things that stays with me about those times is because I couldn't be honest with my family because I couldn't tell my friends.

I'd put myself in so many scary situations. You know, I would meet people who were essentially strangers, and I was only 18, 17, 18. And I would sort of disappear for a few days and had anything truly bad happened to me. I don't think people would ever have found me. And you couldn't ask anybody for advice. I couldn't ask anybody. I couldn't talk to my brother about it. There was no I had to sort of, that really the universal gay experience of the time. I think we were all fumbling forward to find our sense of self and how to be in the world.

But you had spoken to me a little earlier, Terry, about sort of secrets and what we hid, but all my childhood, I felt whenever I was going into a room, I was turning myself slightly to the audience that was viewing me so that they didn't see the entire person. Everything about me felt a little taboo. I was very proud to be working class, but I was taught to be ashamed of being very poor. I was taught to be ashamed to be the son of a single mother, to have addiction at home, and then also taught to be ashamed to be a feminine or gay.

And so even for my family, when I was being bullied at school, for being gay, I thought, you know, all the conditions, which was absolutely supported by religion. But all of society said it was such a wrong thing to be, that when I came home at night, I couldn't tell my family. And when I wrote my first novel, which features a lot of sort of bullying, my sister said to me, "Did you go through that?" And I said, "Yeah, I went through that for about 12 years." And she said, "I didn't know." And I said, "I know you didn't know, I didn't know because I was so ashamed about it."

That I was fearful if I told you that the other kids were bullying me for being gay, that you would also hate me for being gay. What did she say?

I think she was heartbroken, you know, I think she felt so she's always been a huge supporter of me. I love my sister, dearly.

And I think, you know, I think when the person you love is suffering through something in silence, I think you can't help, but just feel like you wish you'd been there to be able to take some of that pain. Let's take another short break here. My guest is Douglas Stewart, author of the novels, "Shuggy Bain and Young Mungo." His new novel is called "John of John." We'll be right back. This is fresh air.

So you lived in the fashion, you worked in the fashion world for about 10 years. -20 years, sorry. -20 years, oh, oh, longer than I thought. I think it was when you were in textile school that, you know, various companies and industries came to the school to scout for talent.

“And I think that's how the Calvin Klein company found you.”

That's right. Yeah, I was just wrapping up my education and I thought I was going to go into the mill system. I thought I was going to go into a very traditional employment and make cloth and make textiles.

up in Sabbath day Lake Maine and had access to all their archives and their clothes. This is 1998. And I based my degree show, my graduate show on it. And at fashion school, all students sort of, they're very utre. You know, the use lots of colour and pattern and feathers. And if they can see quen nothing, they see quenet. And I had created this collection that was incredibly summer, very respectful of the shakers. It was quite monastic, it was very simple. And I watched all these companies come through my college and start to hire graduates.

They would go to Prada, they would go to Gucci. And I thought, oh, I'm never going to get a job because I'm maybe a little too melancholy.

And suddenly the Calvin Klein team came through and they said, this is minimalism.

“I remember it's the end of the '90s. And they said, would you like to come to New York?”

And I had no family home. I had nothing to go back to Scotland for and so I said, yeah. And I've been here now almost 30 years. You said that you liked fashion. And this means like designing fashion. That's both revealing and/or concealing. Can you talk about that a little? Yeah, I think starting in my childhood, I realized that clothes are always deeply psychological and we're always projecting something

who we want to be. And at the same time maybe concealing who we are or what's really going on in our lives. I've written actually in the past about my character seeing someone at university or in college who is waiting very shabby clothes, things they've bought in a second-hand store or old tweeds or old wax jackets. And as a working-class kid, my character says, you know, it's a dream all together to be able to wear clothes that look like you don't care.

Because, you know, in the working class, you're always sort of projecting and aura, I think.

“And so clothes have always found to be deeply psychological and when I start writing a character, I think about what don't they like about themselves?”

What are they trying to hide? What is ill-fitting? Because my own relationship with clothing has always been emotional. I can't just get dressed in the morning and go out. It's always about what am I trying to project? What do you consider to be one of the things that you design when you're working with Calvin Klein? That most speaks to either how you see masculinity or how you see yourself or what you think a garment should do? Actually, the thing I'm most proud of comes after Calvin Klein, I actually was one of the heads of men's wear design at banana republic for 15 years.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, in the early 2000s, when everybody was wearing banana republic, and I got to tell you, as a sort of a young working class boy from a socialist country,

it was such a thrill to come off the subway in the morning and see like, you know, 12 pairs of your chinos before you even got to the office. And suddenly realizing the power of clothing and democracy, where everybody wears something, where it is part of a culture. And I really love that. That used to give me such a thrill when I would see my things everywhere. And sometimes when I'm in an audience now and I sort of look out and I feel a little bit nervous, I have a joke to myself.

“I think, how many people in this audience have worn the underwear that you designed? And that sort of is a bit like my version of pictureing people naked.”

You designed underwear. I designed everything as a knitwear. Wait, I want you about the underwear. Yeah, I designed lots and lots of underwear. And one of the very funny things is when you're fitting underwear on a model, you know, you've got to essentially make the garment fit as well as you can, but you've also got to do it without ever approaching or touching the model. And so a lot of my sort of early design days was just pointing at people's crutches and asking someone to take an inch out of it,

or you know, to make it fit a little bit better around the high waist. But yeah, it's designed everything. Your part of the art world now too, because your husband is the curator of a gallery in New York. So I'm sure you've gone to your share of openings. You have a new story in the New Yorker about the opening of an art show. It's a totally different world from the world you grew up in.

And you've said, you've written that the boy you were wouldn't recognize the man you've become. What would be most unrecognizable? Oh, I think this is why I write everything is because I feel like too very disconnected people. I don't think the boy that I was could imagine this kind of life I'm living now is possible that I can spend all day with books. And then have a husband who talks about art all night and just the real sort of privilege of that is something that, you know,

younger me, couldn't have even dreamt of in his in his wildest dreams. I'm often asked, what would you say to your younger self?

And so so much my writing is trying to connect those parts of my life because they feel like they belong to two different people.

“Do you think that writing is a way to try to I guess maybe you just said that maybe this is basically what you just said that writing is a way of integrating both sides of your life.”

Because you're writing so much about characters who are based in part on the earlier part of your life. You know, I've concealed so much for myself. I was taught that at a very young age, not to be fully honest with whoever I was with about every single part of myself. And it's only now as an adult that I feel like I can do that even talking to you today. But the minute I arrived in America as an American immigrant, I found that the people I fell in love with the friends I made didn't really understand where I came from and so I just stopped talking about it.

I think I had friends that probably thought I still had living parents that I'd grown up middle class with a car and a driveway. Just as they had and when my first novel published, I think my own private life was a revelation to them and they suddenly realized they've been friends with me for 20 years, but they didn't really know me at all. You know, I think it's hard to tell people about grief, it's hard to tell people about poverty, it's hard to share this thing. So I'd got very used to the silence of my own life and only my writing is the only thing that allows me to connect with myself.

“And I think that's why I've written these first three books that sort of look sort of semi autobiographically at my upbringing because I felt like I was losing it to the miss of time or the miss of silence.”

You had to keep so many secrets when you were growing up and as a writer, you write about secrets and you uncover character secrets. And in doing so, you've revealed some of your own secrets because you're drawing on your own life and you're interviewing a lot and you talk about your own life. So it's kind of like you've gotten to the opposite side of the street on that. So where do you stand on secrets now and when they're toxic and when it's really about an earned privacy, you know, a healthy privacy?

That's right, yeah.

You know, when Shuggie Bane first published, there is a sort of a group of interviews I gave at the very beginning where I said the novel was entirely fictional.

I didn't know where it came from, it just came to me as a story and I wrote it. And the effort that it took to maintain that distance from my work in order to protect my private life was exhausting because I didn't know what I'd confess to. I didn't know what was true or not, I didn't know what I'd told people. And so I suddenly, a couple of months in, I started just to be very honest. I grew up like this, this is my background and I found a liberation in that and I found it was much less tiring.

“So one more question, since we talked about the importance of clothes and fashion in your life and designing fashion, what did you wear to your wedding?”

I actually got married at City Hall and I wore a traditional quilt, which had lovely purples and lavenders in it, which was really beautiful. I had a very small wedding, but I was so pleased, you know, I've been with my husband now for 30 years, we've only been married maybe eight years. But it felt really like the final gap between us closing in a way, and now we were a unified hold.

And to your earliest question, you know, I grew up in a church society that said that was absolutely never anything that would be possible for you.

And I quite proud myself on having a successful marriage because I don't think anyone when I was growing up thought I could be an adult that found love and found happiness. And so it's a very valuable thing to me. But what I mostly remember about my wedding is that I got married on the same day as Justin and Haley Bieber. So my own wedding was kind of upstage by the much more famous people that came a couple of couples after me. Douglas Stewart has been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much.

Thank you Terry. It's been an honor.

Stewart's new novel is called John of John. Tomorrow on fresh air, our guests will be the legal scholar who coined the terms critical race theory and intersectionality.

Kimberly Williams Crenshaw. She wanted those expressions to help describe racial and gender discrimination in America. Her new memoir explains the personal and legal reasons behind her thinking. I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh air's executive producer is Sam Brigger, our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Philis Myers and Rebodenado Lauren Prenzel Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth,

Roberta Shoreock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.