Douglas Stewart

Yeah.

You know, when Shuggie Bain first published, there's a sort of a group of interviews I gave at the very beginning where I said the novel was entirely fictional.

I didn't know where it came from.

It just came to me as a story and I wrote it.

And the

The effort that it took to maintain that distance from my work in order to protect my private life was exhausting because I didn't know what I'd confessed to.

I didn't know what was true or not.

I didn't know what I'd told people.

And so I suddenly, a couple of months in, I started just to be very honest.

I grew up like this.

This is my background.

And I found a liberation in that.

And I found it was much less tiring.

I actually got married at City Hall and I wore a traditional kilt, which had lovely purples and lavenders in it, which was really beautiful.

I had a very small wedding, but I was so pleased.

You know, I've been with my husband now for 30 years.

We've only been married maybe eight years.

But it felt really like the final gap between us closing in a way.

And now we were a unified whole.

And to your earliest question, you know, I grew up in a church society that said that was absolutely never anything that would be possible for you.