Douglas Stewart

But yeah, sort of addiction was a central part of my childhood.

And I mean, this is the point where I should say my mother was a wonderful woman and she was a wonderful mother.

She was incredibly kind, incredibly generous.

And I often say that addiction killed my mother, but I don't think as I age that that is true.

I think what killed my mother was, first of all, poverty.

And then the second thing was, is she was a woman who had made a very traditional bargain that said, you don't need an education if you leave school and you should marry the first man that you that you fall in love with and you should have children and you will build a life together.

She eventually married my father.

And when the sort of the country went into 25 percent unemployment under Margaret Thatcher and when my father left her,

You know, she found herself in a very desperate place.

And and so it was that sort of, you know, that upbringing and then also the poverty that we found ourselves in that led to the addiction.

And that's really the thing that killed her.

I think so.

And I think that as a writer now, that's become a through line in all of my work about when a family is disorganized or something's not working, when a parent can't function or a brother acts out, how everybody else has to take on a role that wasn't theirs.

Often in my novels and my first two, the siblings have to become parents and the child has to become the parent.

And even in John of John, we see a structure where the mother is gone for some reason.

And so the grandmother has to almost become a mother herself.

But the great tension is, is that we have John, who is Cal's father, living in a house with his mother-in-law, which I think would just be sort of very tense anyway.

But it's certainly, you know, one of the leaf motifs of my work is about families trying to get through.

Yeah, they were... I always remember as a kid, you know, I was quite expressive.

And I remember my brother buying a new shirt, and it was like a Czech shirt, and it was blue, overwhelmingly blue, but there was a tiny pink line in it, a deck, just tiny, microscopic.