Second life

AFTER SHUGGIE BAIN WAS PUBLISHED, DOUGLAS STUART PREPARED TO PACK IN WRITING AND GO BACK TO THE DAY JOB. He’d spent 10 years on his debut novel, then it came out during a pandemic. “It was the first week of lockdown. I thought, ‘God, this is the end of my publishing career.’” Stuart couldn’t complain. It had received fabulous reviews, even if nobody was buying it, and he knew he could walk straight back into a top job in fashion

Then Shuggie got nominated for the Booker prize and America’s National Book Award for Fiction. In fact, between 2020 and 2021, it was shortlisted for well over 20 major awards. Not bad for a book that had been rejected by more than 4 0 publishers. It won the Booker, which inevitably boosted sales. But here was something different. A novel that had been considered inaccessible and unmarketable was selling by the shelf-load in supermarkets. To date, it has sold more than 1.3m copies in the English language alone. This brutal love story about a young gay boy trying to protect his alcoholic mother from herself and the ravages of the world, partially written in the Scottish vernacular, had huge popular appeal. Perhaps even more remarkable, Stuart had not read a book for pleasure until he was 16.

We meet at a basement bar in the East Village in Lower Manhattan, where Stuart, 45, has lived for 21 years. Life couldn’t be more different from the high-rise blocks and tenements where he grew up in Glasgow. It’s here that he made a success of himself as a fashion designer for Calvin Klein and Banana Republic, here that he earned more money than he ever thought possible, and here that he married the man who has been his partner since he