This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Douglas Stuart, whose novel John of John is out today from Grove Atlantic. Before John-Calum Macleod returns to his father’s home, in the Outer Hebrides, he rearranges his backpack: Cal hides his dubbed cassettes and gay newspaper under a pile of dirty laundry and his mother’s discarded Bible. The elder John Macleod is a tweed weaver and Presbyterian lay pastor who keeps a record of every time his neighbors miss a Sabbath, and though Cal has barely cobbled together a life in Edinburgh after graduating art school, coming back to the crofter’s house to care for his ailing grandmother feels like a punishment. “Part of him wanted to tell his father he was gay, if only to hurt him for demanding his return.” In a starred review, Publishers Weekly wrote that Stuart “showcases his impressive gift for characterization in this perceptive and propulsive story.” And Colm Tóibín praised John of John as having “an urgency, an immediacy, a brilliant sense of place, the drama of fierce emotion repressed, concealed and volcanically exposed.” Douglas Stuart’s New York Times best-selling debut novel, Shuggie Bain (Grove Atlantic, 2020), won the Booker Prize and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award. His second novel, Young Mungo (Grove Atlantic, 2022), was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal and a finalist for the British Book Award. Stuart lives in New York City.
Douglas Stuart, author of John of John. (Credit: Desiree Adams)
1. How long did it take you to write John of John?
The book took six years to write. I began writing it in the long anxious wait for my debut, Shuggie Bain, to publish. I have spent over half my life as a Scottish Immigrant living in America and I realized as a Scotsman I had never visited our outlying islands. I set out to explore the Outer Hebrides and lived there for many months, moving from place to place.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The culture of the islands is so singular and unique that I had to become an expert in things I had little knowledge of. I became fascinated by sheep farming, conservative Calvinism, tweed weaving, and the Gaelic language. I was truly an outsider. I spent months talking to everyone who would talk to me, and recording over a hundred hours of interviews, chatting about anything from the reproductive cycles of ewes to why some people in rural places never seem to find their special person.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I’m good in the very early morning and then again in the evening. I live in a small apartment in lower Manhattan. I always say I sit at my kitchen table to write, but who cooks in New York? So technically it’s more accurate to say my desk is in a room other people would recognize as a kitchen.
4. What are you reading right now?
The Plague by Camus. But what I really want to be reading is The Disappearers by Marlon James. It comes out this September.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
For such a small country, Scotland’s literary output has been consistently excellent and there are many incredible Scottish writers who should be better known overseas. I’m in awe of the talents of Martin MacInnes, Jenni Fagan, and Graeme Macrae Burnet.
6. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book?
There’s a beloved grandmother, Ella, at the heart of the novel. She’s a fleshy, irreverent, foul-mouthed woman who’s the keeper of the truth in a world of upstanding Presbyterian men. Ella was a tribute to all the fearless women who raised me and she was the most fun to write. I’ll miss her terribly.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
By 2024 I had exhausted my own thinking with the novel. I submitted a draft to my agent, Anna Stein, and was looking forward to her feedback. Anna gave me some feedback—but not nearly as much as I was expecting. Then she signed off with a note that said: “I don’t think the book has revealed itself to you yet….” If I’m honest, I was devastated. I put the book aside for several months. I fought it. I muddled through. Then suddenly one day the skies parted. A character had done something they shouldn’t have, which set the whole novel down the wrong path. I had to strip the book back and throw out the entire second half. With that, I realized a little too late just how wise my agent had been. No agent can reveal a book to its writer.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started John of John, what would you say?
I don’t believe in this line of advice. I think every mistake or every moment of doubt is just part of the process.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of John of John?
I made a wonderful playlist of Gaelic psalm singing. In the Calvinist tradition, all worship must be without accompaniment. To keep the tune, there’s a precentor in each church who ‘sets out the line’ and sings the psalm before the congregation responds. Sung in archaic, biblical Gaelic it is the most beautiful, otherworldly sound and it transports me to the islands every time.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I love a fully realized world. I want my readers to feel like there are stories behind stories, streets behind streets. When I was in the editing phase for Shuggie Bain, I was resistant to edits because every scene, every glance felt essential in building the world. After much back and forth, my editor, Peter Blackstock, eventually found the way to reach me. He said, “I love Shuggie and Agnes so much that when I am away from them, I miss them. Think of the page as a camera. You can pull away every now and then, but please don’t stray too far.” I found that to be invaluable advice.
