Ten Years and 32 Rejections

Hello and welcome to the second Read With Us edition of Why We Think You Should Read Shuggie Bain! 

Last week Carole told us that while it might be a difficult book to read, it was completely immersive and full of humanity. I would certainly agree with her, but I was also pleasantly surprised that it wasn't quite as difficult to read as I had expected. This may be partly because I was lucky enough not to grow up in poverty with an alcoholic parent so I had some distance from the pain and sadness in the book. 

But there is also love, vulnerability, ambition, and perseverance contained within its pages. I read several articles about the author, Douglas Stuart, wondering about how this remarkable book came to be. It's his debut novel, took him ten years to write, and was rejected by 32 publishers before being released during a pandemic and winning the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2020. Mr. Stuart told the Irish Times, “I don’t mean to be too Pollyanna about it, but you’re looking for someone who loves your work as much as you do. So the rejection was just part of the journey.” This is definitely an author who interests me!

While the novel isn't autobiographical, it is based on Stuart's experiences growing up in Glasgow. He didn't know his father, his mother was an alcoholic who died when he was 16, he was bullied for being gay, all set amongst unemployment and a recession. The book speaks of the shame of poverty and otherness and how people cope and go on.

Douglas Stuart's mother in 1973

"When you grow up as a child of trauma, you have no control over that. Especially when it’s a parent suffering from addiction, it’s really a black hole, and you’re just whipped around it, trying to cope. So if you can take that trauma and turn it into art, and take control over it as fiction, it’s an incredibly powerful place to be in.”

When asked if he ever wondered "How did I get here?", Douglas Stuart said, "Hard work? ... I think when someone comes from the working class there is meant to be an overabundance of luck in there. I know there’s a lot of really lucky things that have happened to me in my life. But kids that are standing behind the starting line have to put in twice as much effort just to catch up. We don’t all win the lottery, Simon Cowell doesn’t call, the Booker doesn’t just give it to you unless you can first of all show up with the goods. That’s part of my Scottish upbringing. You just get your head down and you carry on with it.” (Emphasis mine)

The books that I love the most and stay with me are the ones that make me feel, think about things, and that I learn from. For me, Shuggie Bain may the one of the top books in that category, and it just might be for you, too.

Be sure to check in with Kym next Tuesday for her post about this exceptional book, and put June 8th on your calendar for our Read With Us blog discussion and Zoom night.