The Place That Keeps Calling You Back: A Conversation with Douglas Stuart

You could play a game of Cat’s Cradle with my heartstrings every time I read a work by Douglas Stuart. Like countless readers, I was twitterpated by his Booker Prize–winning debut novel, Shuggie Bain (Grove Atlantic, 2020), and his bestselling follow-up, Young Mungo (Grove Atlantic, 2023), bespelled by the magic of his language—its precision, its wit, its ability to render characters so deeply personal you can’t help but feel altered by the encounter, both on the page and in the imprint they leave behind. Set against the working-class Glasgow of his youth, Stuart’s novels center queer characters coming of age amid poverty, addiction, and deeply patriarchal environments—yet what emerges, again and again, is their capacity for tenderness, their humanity pressing steadily toward the surface.

In his latest, however, Stuart pivots to the Isle of Harris, where his characters are held in close proximity—less against a backdrop than confined within a community where everyone knows one another, even the things they believe they’ve hidden. 

In John of John, Cal comes home after graduating from art school only to find little has changed—or perhaps he is the one who has. He returns to the croft house where he lives with his father, John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and laypreacher, and his foul-mouthed grandmother, Ella, and quickly finds himself folded back into the cycles of work, worship, and survival that define the island. In private, Cal seeks out sex with men—even placing a lonely hearts ad in a local paper—while his father, John, is constantly critical of his appearance and reluctance to be “saved.” John, however, has secrets of his own. As everything threatens to unravel, we see how silence remains the fabric of a community, and how, even in that silence, there are moments that insist on being felt. 

I was delighted to talk with Stuart over email about silence, desire, and the lives we build—and return to—in the places that shape us.

The Rumpus: This novel begins with Cal returning home to the Isle of Harris, to a place that seems unchanged on the surface. What drew you to that moment of return, and to the dissonance of feeling like a stranger in a place that still knows you so well?

Douglas Stuart: I have complicated feelings about home. Part of that stems from growing up gay in a macho, patriarchal country, but the other part is the fact that I was raised by a single mother who died when I was sixteen, and so all sense of home was obliterated in that moment. I grew up in Scotland, but I’ve lived my adult life in New York. I go back to Glasgow two or three times a year, but because I never quite felt like I belonged and because there’s no family home to go to, I can’t ever really, truly go “home,” which is such a strange, lonely feeling. It’s the only place I make sense, the only place where I don’t have to explain myself to be understood, and so I feel like I’m locked out of something that other people just take for granted.

All my work has been about the cost of belonging, because I find that the price of belonging is conformity. Especially as someone from a working-class background who was raised to always think of the “we” and never the “I,” home and belonging is so wrapped up in community and identity. But can you belong somewhere if you don’t fit in or if you aren’t exactly like those around you?  

Rumpus: How is this book your way of exploring that?

Stuart: At first, it seems like a fairly traditional story about the return of a prodigal son to his rural, conservative Christian home. Cal feels a great conflict about coming home because he feels like he has changed and outgrown the place, but also because he is gay and on the verge of that wonderful moment where young people are usually striking out and making their own lives. Yet at the very moment of his graduation, he’s called home to care for his ailing grandmother. 

Once he arrives home (and I don’t think this is a spoiler), he discovers everything is not quite what it seems. I hope the novel morphs from the return of the prodigal into something more interesting. I was fascinated by the arrogance of youth. Lots of gay people of my generation believed their secret sexuality was the most interesting and potentially disruptive thing in their family unit. We thought our parents and grandparents were steady and settled as people, that they had become exactly who they set out to become. I wanted to write a book that turned that on its head. Cal coming home and being in the closet is almost the least interesting thing in the book.  

Rumpus: Your previous novels are so rooted in Glasgow, but here the Isle of Harris feels almost elemental—the landscape, the isolation, the tempo of crofting life. How did writing into that environment shape the story differently for you?

Stuart: It was a huge shift for me. My first two novels deal with the city as a backdrop, and the thing about Glasgow is that the wildest opposites exist in close juxtaposition: sadness and laughter, tenderness and violence—it’s part of what makes the city feel so alive. 

Rumpus: What were some of the challenges?

Stuart: One of them was matching its heartbeat to the rhythm of the islands. Nothing on the islands happens quickly and everything that happens is remembered forever. 

I had never been to the islands. As a poor kid who had grown up in the city, I hadn’t actually seen much of Scotland. So, in 2019, while I was waiting for Shuggie Bain to be published, I set out for the Outer Hebrides. Over seven years, I lived on the islands for sixteen weeks. I had an idea that I wanted to write about loneliness but if that failed, then at least I would know my own country a little better. I wanted to write about the queer experience from a rural perspective because I always felt that when we talked about the working class we excluded our rural areas. When I arrived, I knew two people on the islands, but when I left some months later, I knew hundreds more. I traveled up the archipelago and finally settled upon the east coast of Harris as the novel’s setting. It’s a wild and barren landscape, quite lunar in appearance—in fact, it’s claimed that the bedrock found there appears only in a few other places, and one of those is the moon’s surface. 

Everything on Harris is shaped by the seasons, and by the changing, often very harsh, weather. Crofting and sheep farming set the workload and its rhythms. But there’s also a church calendar. The islands are home to a very strict form of Calvinism, which believes deeply in the Sabbath and so all work stops, all recreation stops, and everyone turns to God. There’s an absolute silence that descends on a Sunday, and whether you’re a believer or not, you’re expected to respect it. Then, underneath all of this is the natural rhythm of a place with a long intergenerational memory. People are very considerate with their words and actions because they’ll live with the consequences for a long time. Before I could even begin to write the characters, I had to contend with all of this.

Rumpus: The relationship between Cal and his father feels shaped as much by what isn’t said as by what is, especially around faith, masculinity, and desire. What gnawed at you the most when building that tension between them?

Stuart: My father walked out on us when I was four. I never had a father figure of my own and I feel the lack of that almost daily. Not to get too navel gaze-y, but I suspect this novel is—at least in part —my attempt at working out what a father and son can mean to one another. Even in the tense moments between them, I never doubt that Cal and John love one another.

Rumpus: There’s also the proximity—it’s almost like wherever they go, there they are. There’s the geographic proximity, of course, but also the closeness between the characters—the way they live, work, and worship alongside one another—which adds a different kind of texture.

Stuart: Writing the novel was an experiment in pressure, in how much silence a family could hold before that silence ruptured and the truth came pouring out. I set the Macleod house at the end of a long, empty road, right by the sea, because I wanted them to feel a little removed from the world and for the house to feel claustrophobic. All three generations live together, work together, and worship together. They know one another on such a profoundly intimate level that almost nothing can be concealed, except for matters of the heart and the things that everyone knows to be true but are too painful to confront. 

Luckily, Scottish men and avoidance go hand in hand.

Rumpus: Cal isn’t the only character with secrets, and there’s a sense that many of the men in this community are living with things they can’t fully name or express. It’s almost as though secrecy is something communal.

Stuart: The great misconception about rural places is that they are private. It’s such a lie. Everything on the islands is about community, you must really rely on your neighbors to survive, and because so little happens nothing escapes the attention of those around you. 

I spent months on the islands and even though I was almost always alone, every now and then it would come to my attention that just about everything I had done had been spotted or witnessed by someone. I was actually never alone, and even in my loneliest moments, I was rarely unobserved.

I was fascinated by what people know versus what they could or would discuss in polite society. I think most people’s private shames or intimate secrets are common knowledge. At the very least they are guessed at and whispered about behind closed doors. Yet at the very same time to acknowledge them openly, and then to live next door to them for the next fifty or a hundred years would be so difficult. I was intrigued by the truths that communities agree to bury. The things people pretend not to see.

Rumpus: How did you think about shaping desire within what’s known and what’s admitted?

Stuart: During the research period I travelled up the archipelago moving from settlement to settlement working on what would ultimately be over a hundred hours of interviews. I had to learn about everything from sheep rearing to tweed weaving. I was at this project for about four weeks, when I noticed that every settlement I visited usually had a few spinsters or bachelors, older people who had never married, which was a little unusual in such a Christian, family-oriented place. It was explained to me that people simply “missed their moment” to find love because there were so few people to fall in love with anyway. There were other people who were busy caring for elderly parents or simply couldn’t be bothered by the hard work of dealing with the opposite sex. 

One afternoon, I was interviewing an islander, sitting at her kitchen table drinking tea and eating the pancakes she had made for me, when she began to explain the backstory of the various older bachelors who lived in her small settlement. I said to her, quite reflexively, “Well, of course, some of those who had never married must be gay,” and the woman sort of reared back, and said, “Oh, no, no, no. Never.” This was the exact moment that the novel took shape for me. She was neither cruel nor in the least bit homophobic but to her being gay was simply not a possibility. Gay desire and gay people exist so far outside of what is acceptable in Scripture that we almost don’t exist at all. It was a challenge to conjure a place where there was an absence of homophobia and yet at the same time queer lives were entirely erased.

Rumpus: Cal and his father seem to be navigating desire in very different ways. How did you think about those contrasts?

Stuart: Cal, who’s in his twenties, is looking for sex. He’s stuck in an unhealthy sexual relationship with his best friend, who is straight. He lets the friend use his body and gets nothing in return. I think lots of gay men have found themselves, at one point or another, settling for a love that is beneath them, or trying to convince themselves that scraps are enough to live on. For John, Cal’s father, there’s sexual desire but also a need for companionship, for a quiet domestic life with another man. It was inspiring to look at desire across the generations and how what we want changes as we age. 

Rumpus: As the novel unfolds, so much is gradually revealed, and there’s a sense that these patterns—of silence, repression, and longing—don’t just exist in isolation, but are repeated across generations. Were you thinking about that idea in terms of inheritance?

Stuart: Funny you mention patterns. I mapped the novel out as a series of overlapping threads. The men in the novel are tweed weavers, and so to them everything forms a pattern. Being a good weaver is sympatico with being an obedient Christian. I think that’s why John is drawn to it and why Cal hates the weaving. Perfect weaving requires submitting to a larger design without question or deviation. It’s the cooperation of thousands of threads, each falling perfectly in place, doing only what is asked of them, never deviating, never standing out or disrupting the pattern. (Did you know that I have a master’s in textile design? I’m a terrible weaver. I blame my queerness. I hate the patterns established by others.)

Inheritance is also a pattern to be followed. There is the real, material issue of inheritance that most farming families face: who will take on the burden of this house and this land and also, in doing so, who will care for the elderly in the house? It’s complicated further by the fact that all island crofting is subsistence farming, so by accepting his inheritance, Cal would be signing up for a life of hard work and very little reward. All the men before him have signed up for this. Who is he to break this pattern? And if he breaks this pattern then he insults the sacrifice of his ancestors.

But you’re right, a closeted gay man, a fallen woman, a son who gives up his future to care for a father—if something happens in the novel, I wanted to show how a version of this had happened to all the generations that had come before. Part of this is a rebuke to silence—how the worst part of silence is that it forces us to struggle on our own, thinking we’re the only people who have suffered with an issue. 

Shuggie Bain is a novel about a son losing his mother to alcoholism. Growing up, I had always been conditioned to believe that addiction was a shameful thing, a personal failing and something I should keep to myself. Publishing the book revealed to me just how many people had gone through the exact same thing, and sadly, how many young people are still going through it. Nothing in this world is new.

Rumpus: There are moments in the novel where everything the characters have been carrying feels like it comes to a kind of breaking point. What did you want those moments to feel like emotionally for the reader, and how did you think about building toward them?

Stuart: Well, the reader knows things the characters don’t, so I suppose I wanted readers to feel really tense, but also on occasion to think, “Oh God, please don’t fuck that guy!” There’s a sick pleasure for the writer in taking two characters, letting them have different understandings of the truth and then rubbing them together to see how far you can push it before things blow up. 

Building toward that takes time. The silences in the novel are so ingrained. There are secrets in the book that are at least fifty years old. When people commit to keeping a secret that long, it would take a lot to convince them to finally face the truth, but I think everyone eventually arrives at that moment where facing the truth is less exhausting than carrying the lie. I wanted the readers to feel like they had arrived at the exact moment where the Macleods were, finally laying their burdens down after decades of pain.

I also wanted the reader to know that secrets aren’t always inherently selfish. Sometimes we keep secrets to protect those we love, or to protect their understanding of reality. Secrets, even lies, can sometimes be noble in intention. Cal’s mother, Grace, is one of my favorite characters. She has been quite heroic in her silence.

Rumpus: There’s such a striking contrast in the novel between the men, who often avoid or suppress what they’re feeling, and the women, who seem to see and understand far more than they say.

Stuart: All throughout the writing of the book, I was thinking of the willful ignorance of men and the deep-knowing of women and how these things exist in the same space. I was thinking of all the men I know who could spend an entire lifetime avoiding the truth or not discussing their feelings, and of all the women I know who have learned how to hold the truth for everyone and how to cope with that silence. Just because something is unsaid doesn’t mean that a woman doesn’t understand. I was raised by women who had to deal with emotionally stunted men, men who had control over everything from work to worship, and yet in their own way had to be babied, or have the world managed for them because of its emotional complexity. I was thinking of all the women who ran the world from the back. The character of Ella is based on my grandmother and her friends and they knew everything. It would be a cold day in hell before you could fool one of those women.

Rumpus: What does home mean to you at the end of this story?

Stuart: In the novel, home is a place that keeps calling you back. It’s a place you can never escape, where every part of your personality, every pain, has its roots. In my personal life, I still have no idea what home means. Finding that out might be my life’s work.