And I know that from personal experience - but we don't like to read about fallible women. But when a mother does it and when a woman does it, we really take a lot of scorn in that. I come from a long literary tradition about writing about the struggling soul, or the poor sort of struggling addict. And here is a woman who is just limited by the options that were afforded to working class mothers of the time. She's beautiful, she's proud, she's vain and she's incredibly generous. I do resist people seeing Agnes as the alcoholic mother, because she is funny. And so in a lot of ways, writing the book was about sort of bringing those two halves back together.

The man who worked in fashion in New York, but then the boy who grew up in Glasgow. And so I've always felt like my life has been two very distinct parts. And we're never really taught to express ourselves, or to get in touch with our deeper feelings. You know, men from the West Coast of Scotland, it's a very masculine society. I think one of the greatest things you can do when you've been a child who's suffered trauma and been around addiction where you have absolutely no control over it, is actually to turn it into art and really sort of examine it up closely.

I think one of the greatest things you can do when you've been a child who's suffered trauma and been around addiction where you have absolutely no control over it, is actually to turn it into art.

Douglas stuart new book