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Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart on the isolation of secret-keeping

Fresh Air

Mon May 04 2026

Summary

Fresh Air – Scottish Novelist Douglas Stuart on the Isolation of Secret-Keeping

Air Date: May 4, 2026
Host: Terry Gross
Guest: Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize–winning author ("Shuggie Bain," "Young Mungo")
Main Theme: Exploring secrecy, masculinity, generational change, and working-class life in Stuart’s new novel "John of John"—with personal reflections interwoven.

Episode Overview

Douglas Stuart joins Terry Gross to discuss his new novel "John of John," which delves into the culture of secrecy and the complexities of faith, masculinity, and identity on a remote Scottish island. Stuart draws on his own experiences growing up as a gay, working-class boy in Glasgow, his complicated family life, and his later career as a fashion designer. The conversation navigates Stuart’s literary influences, family dynamics marked by addiction and unspoken burdens, and how keeping secrets shapes both individuals and communities.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Genesis of "John of John"

Setting the Scene: The new novel is set in the Hebrides, focusing on a conservative, close-knit weaving community ([00:55–04:09]).
Concealed Lives: Stuart was inspired by rural stories of lifelong bachelors and spinsters, and how “missing their moment” was code for something deeper—often unspoken homosexuality.

“In rural places, ... the window to find someone to love could be quite short, quite narrow. ... Of course, some of them might be gay.” – Douglas Stuart [03:29]
Father & Son Parallel: Both father (John, a church deacon) and son (Cal) are secretly gay, neither knowing the other’s truth. Stuart wanted to explore intergenerational differences in how queerness is experienced and hidden.

Contrasting Generations and Social Change

John’s World: Raised in a traditional setting with strict religious beliefs, John’s homosexuality is only felt as an isolated, private desire—he has no way to contextualize it as identity ([04:27–05:47]).
Cal’s Experience: Coming of age in a changing, more liberal Scotland, Cal had glimpses of acceptance and community beyond the island, but remains constrained by the need for secrecy at home.

The Loneliness of Difference

Growing Up in Glasgow: Stuart recalls being marked as “different” before he even understood sexuality—due to narrow standards of masculinity ([06:39–07:55]).

“We were all sons of hardworking fathers ... men were meant to be very specific—very brave, very strong, hardworking, but also quite emotionally distant.” – Douglas Stuart [06:53]
Lack of Representation: No books, gay bars, or visible role models—he describes a profound sense of isolation and not belonging.

Religion, Sectarianism & Identity

Straddling Divides: Stuart grew up between Catholic and Protestant traditions, not fully claimed by either ([07:59–09:26]).
Tribal Violence: Sectarian identity was performed through Saturday street fights, which, in retrospect, felt “entirely pointless.”

“It was a way to sort of have a camaraderie. ... After fighting … I would go home to my single mother, who was a Catholic.” – Douglas Stuart [08:52]

Path to Textiles & Art

Art as Sanctuary: With no tradition of reading at home and academic options foreclosed by poverty, Stuart’s teachers steered him toward textiles ([09:53–13:54]).
Intimate Teaching: Stuart was, for a time, the only student in English class—an unexpected opening into reading.

“Children need a huge amount of peace in their lives in order to read ... and I didn’t have any of that.” – Douglas Stuart [10:28]
Discovering Craft: He describes textile school as an unexpected creative outlet with practical promise in crafts like weaving, knitting (even medical machines), and how it always felt he was a “writer that couldn’t be a writer.”

Weaving, Work, and Economic Shifts

Harris Tweed Tradition: On the Hebrides, each family might have their own loom—a survival measure with socialist roots ([14:44–15:39]).
Economic Collapse: Cal’s art-school skills are outdated; the textile industry has vanished from Scotland, pushing him back to his father’s home and loom.

Masculinity, Family, and Homophobia

Intergenerational Tensions: The novel dramatizes a pattern Stuart saw—conservative fathers shaping sons through religious and social pressures, using shame and silence ([16:17–18:41]).
Personal Reflection: Stuart’s own brother felt responsible for Stuart’s homosexuality, believing masculinity was learned ([19:07–20:08]):

“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, … I felt terrible for him for that.” – Douglas Stuart [19:25]
Burden of Guilt: The family was awash in misplaced guilt—Stuart feeling he couldn’t save his mother from addiction, his brother from failing to make Stuart masculine ([27:49–28:16]).

Gendered Drinking and Mother’s Inner Life

Female Spaces: Unlike the men's public drinking, women (including Stuart’s mother) drank and confided at home ([23:23–25:23]).
Eavesdropping on Womanhood: As a child, Stuart overheard raw discussions, shaping his understanding of women as complex individuals—a perspective he now channels into his fiction.

The Architecture of Secrets

Addiction and Secrecy: Hiding bottles, managing perceptions, always gauging what to reveal—secrecy pervaded family life ([25:47–27:49]).
Class, Sexuality, and Shame: Everything about Stuart’s childhood felt "a little taboo," and he hid pain even from family ([35:03–36:25]).

“All my childhood, I felt ... I was turning myself slightly to the audience ... Everything about me felt a little taboo.” – Douglas Stuart [35:13]
Bottled Loneliness: Silence with family about being bullied and gay lingered for years, even after publication of his first novel.

Navigating the Fashion World

From Glasgow to New York: Calvin Klein scouted Stuart for his “somber, monastic” graduate collection ([37:54–39:08]).
Clothing as Art & Armor: Fashion, for Stuart, is psychological—“always projecting something ... maybe concealing who we are” ([39:19–40:22]).
Banana Republic Pride: Designed widely-worn essentials, finding thrill in their democratic ubiquity ([40:42–41:35]).

“It was such a thrill ... seeing like, you know, 12 pairs of your chinos before you even got to the office.” – Douglas Stuart [41:00]
Designing Underwear: Even the intimacy of underwear design is fraught with boundaries and subtlety.

Integrating Past & Present Selves

Impossible Distance: The boy from deprivation could never have imagined the successful, art-soaked life he now lives ([42:39–43:21]).
Writing as Connection:

“My writing is the only thing that allows me to connect with myself.” – Douglas Stuart [44:32]
Secrecy to Liberation: Initially, Stuart denied “Shuggie Bain” was autobiographical, but found liberation in eventually telling the truth ([45:26–46:06]).

The Meaning of Marriage

Traditional Kilt at City Hall: Stuart wore a purple and lavender kilt when marrying his longtime partner—a culmination of personal and social change ([46:17–47:14]).
Transcending Early Prohibitions:

“I grew up in a church society that said that was absolutely never anything that would be possible for you. And I quite pride myself on having a successful marriage.” – Douglas Stuart [46:54]
Memorable Moment: The wedding was upstaged by pop star Justin Bieber’s, a final surreal note.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Rural Life and Concealed Sexuality

“The window to find someone to love could be quite short, quite narrow. … I said … ‘Well, some of them might be gay,’ and the woman said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, that’s not so.’” – Douglas Stuart [03:29]
On Masculinity and Expressiveness

“I had too much to say for myself. … The other boys just sort of turned at me en masse and said, ‘What is wrong with you?’” – Douglas Stuart [07:16]
On Family Guilt

“My brother … believed that masculinity was a learned thing. … So my sexuality … was some failing in how he had raised me. And I felt terrible for him for that.” – Douglas Stuart [19:18]
On Secrecy

“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.” – Douglas Stuart [35:13]
On Fashion’s Power

“What I mostly remember about my wedding is that I got married on the same day as Justin and Hailey Bieber down at City Hall.” – Douglas Stuart [47:05]

Timestamps for Key Segments

Premise of "John of John" and inspiration: [02:32–04:09]
On generations of masculinity and being gay: [04:09–06:06]
Growing up as an outsider in Glasgow: [06:39–07:55]
Religion and sectarianism’s impact: [07:59–09:26]
Finding art, English, and textiles: [09:53–13:54]
Cultural and economic shift in weaving: [14:44–15:39]
Family and masculine expectations: [16:17–20:08]
Reflections on mother and women’s culture: [23:23–25:23]
The function of secrets in family dynamics: [25:47–27:49]
On being marked “not masculine enough”: [30:13–32:12]
LGBTQ+ young adulthood and correspondence: [32:12–34:32]
Fashion career and design philosophy: [37:35–41:35]
Personal integration and writing: [42:39–44:52]
From secrecy to liberation in public life: [45:26–46:06]
Marriage and final reflections: [46:17–47:14]

Episode Wrap-Up

Douglas Stuart’s conversation with Terry Gross is as much about the power and cost of secrets—how they isolate, distort, and sometimes protect—as it is about literature and the arc of social change. Through vivid storytelling and candid reflection, Stuart illuminates the intertwining of class, gender, sexuality, and aspiration, both on the page and in his own life.

Not just a literary hour, but a moving meditation on the ache and necessity of self-revelation.

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Transcript

Terry Gross (0:00)

This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel, that's your drive. For more. Capella University's Flexpath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella. Edu. This is FRESH air. I'm Terry Gross. You may have read my guest books. You may have worn the clothes he designed. Douglas Stewart's first novel, Shuggie Bain, won the Booker 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 Banana Republic. 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 and he didn't know anyone else who was. The novel Shuggie Bain tells a story very similar to Stuart's own childhood. Stuart 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 Marin Corrigan's review, she wrote, it's hard to imagine a more disquieting and powerful work of fiction will be published anytime soon. I about the perils of being different. Douglas Stuart has a new novel called John of John that explores themes of faith, obligation and how isolating secrets can be. It's set on a fictional island in Scotland's Hebrides in a very old fashioned conservative community of weavers. There are two Johns in the story, a father and his son. The son is known as Cal. Cal has just graduated textile school in Glasgow and and reluctantly returns home when his father insists he needs Cal's help to take care of Cal's sick grandmother. Cal is gay and keeps it a secret from everyone, including his father. But as we learn 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 G and they're not only keeping it a secret from everyone else, they're keeping it a secret from each other?

Douglas Stuart (2:32)

Yes. I mean, I am a Scotsman 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.

Announcer (2:54)

And.

Douglas Stuart (9:53)

In fact, when I was 16 and I was guided towards textiles, I couldn't quite tell you what the word textile meant. I'm often asked, as a writer, what was your favorite childhood book? What did you read as a kid? 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 at the boys I grew up around, many of them also weren't reading either. But, you know, children also need a huge amount of peace in their lives in order to read. You know, 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 of her. And when I left for school in the morning, she was fine. When I came home at lunchtime, 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. It 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 at 16, 17, 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, turned me towards something that I could make a living at.

Douglas Stuart (16:17)

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 Cal 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 in the correct historical manner. So you've no work and 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 harbouring 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 them 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 honours. It's not my fault the country's in the bin. He wanted to tell his father about the sorry state of the Scottish textile industry, how Pringle was all but Chinese owned, how Barry Knitwear had been steadily shedding jobs, how Inner Leithen was a mill 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.

Douglas Stuart (23:23)

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 the family oftentimes, certainly my family tried to sort of keep it at 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, it's 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 childcare. 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 6, 7, 8 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 pretense. 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 mothers should never tell children. But that energy comes in my novels now. 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 as 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, yeah, just look at that domestic scene.

Douglas Stuart (32:39)

I once had this conversation with the great Irish writer Colm 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 hairy, 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 in 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 to feel like I wasn't so invisible in the world. And one thing that was really formative to my youth was there used to be a magazine that was like a teen pop magazine. And in the back of that magazine there 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 Bronte sister, how 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. 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 had told me he was a 22 year old man. And then he turned out to be 48. And so catfishing is a very old art form, I think.