It’s very Scottish to be direct about difficult things, so there’s no point in pretending it wasn’t a hard place to live. I hope “Shuggie Bain” is a love story to Glasgow, not a fawning love story but one that sees the city clearly. I have a complicated relationship with my home town-but there’s no place I love more. Where we come from always informs the people we become, no matter if you move far away from home, like I did. How important was it for you to capture Glasgow itself in your work? It’s rare that we get to create something that is private and not heavy with expectation-I mean, people can’t even have dinner now without feeling compelled to photograph it and share it with the world. Writing with no pressure was a lucky space to be in and a pure pleasure. I was so involved with my career that I wrote “Shuggie Bain” only for myself and never dared to imagine it being published. At the time, I worked primarily as a menswear designer in the fashion industry, so I had to steal all the time I could to write-early mornings and every sick day. I wanted to study English literature at college but was persuaded against it, as “not a thing boys from my background do.” So I trained and had a career in the textiles trade and began secretly writing “Shuggie Bain” about twelve years ago. You just told yourself stories in order to cope. I hid the facts of my home life from the outside world. I was always hiding myself from the other kids around me, and, when I was bullied, I would go home and lie to my family and pretend everything was fine. From the time I was six years old, everything about me felt like a fiction it became a matter of pretending in order to fit in. I grew up in a house with no books, but I’ve been telling stories for as long as I can remember. She never, not even once, got past the dedication: “To Elizabeth Taylor, who thinks she does, but knows nothing about the cruelties of love.” She would have made a better poet! My father left when I was a boy, and she used to love to settle down with a half-dozen cans of lager, and she would dictate as I scribbled away.
My first writing commission was at age seven, as a ghostwriter for my mother’s autobiography. How long have you been writing? Did you always know you wanted to publish a novel? Your first novel, “ Shuggie Bain,” which traces the life of a young boy and his alcoholic mother in Glasgow, comes out in February, and I believe this is the first story you’ve published. To write something intimate to a stranger is a perilous act-it’s a little ironic because it’s a bit like novel writing, where you’re sharing these personal things and you have no idea how the other person will receive it both take a lot of faith and hope! In reality, the letter exchange was usually the best part-when you did finally meet the other boy, he was often not as interesting as he was in writing. It takes a lot of effort to write a letter, let alone make yourself sound not only interesting but desirable. I described “Found Wanting” to a young gay friend of mine who grew up in the late aughts and he could not even wrap his head around the idea of corresponding like this. But compared to how people connect on the Internet today-and how quickly it becomes about sexual bartering-these personals were such an innocent space. When I stumbled across these ads, at the age of fifteen or so, it was incredibly exciting-it made me feel less alone, less “wrong.” Back then, personal ads and phone chat lines were a lifeline for young queer people-in a way, they were precursors to the dating apps we see now. On the housing scheme where I grew up, there was a real stigma to being gay it was a hard working-man’s world, and it was unimaginable for anyone to consider themselves out and proud.
These types of personal ads were my first connection with a gay community when I was a young man. When did you start thinking about writing a story with a personal ad at its heart? Your story “ Found Wanting,” which takes place in the early nineteen-nineties, is about a seventeen-year-old Glaswegian boy who has placed a lonely-hearts ad in a magazine.