Douglas Stewart

And just the real sort of privilege of that is something that, you know, younger me doesn't.

couldn't have even dreamt of in his wildest dreams.

I'm often asked, what would you say to your younger self?

And my answer to that is I wouldn't because he would sort of look at me as though I was an alien that had landed from another planet.

And so much of my writing is trying to connect those parts of my life because they feel like they belong to two different people.

You know, I've concealed so much of myself.

I was taught that at a very young age, not to be fully honest with whoever I was with about every single part of myself.

And it's only now as an adult that I feel like I can do that, even talking to you today.

But the minute I arrived in America as an American immigrant,

I found that the people I fell in love with, the friends I made, didn't really understand where I came from, and so I just stopped talking about it.

I think I had friends that probably thought I still had living parents, that I'd grown up middle class with a car and a driveway, just as they had.

And when my first novel published, I think my own private life was a revelation to them, and they suddenly realized, oh, they've been friends with me for 20 years, but...

They didn't really know me at all.

You know, I think it's hard to tell people about grief.

It's hard to tell people about poverty.

It's hard to share this thing.

And so I'd got very used to the silence in my own life and only my writing.

My writing is the only thing that allows me to connect with myself.

And I think that's why I've written these first three books that sort of look sort of semi-autobiographically at my upbringing because I felt like I was losing it to the mists of time or the mists of silence.

That's right.