This week’s story, “A Private View,” takes place at an advance showing for an exhibition at a museum of art in New York. When did you first think that this might make a good backdrop for a work of fiction? How did you decide what should be on display?

The story started with the idea of having an ending take place at an art opening. I wanted to write about a man from a working-class background, travelling through an impressive museum and feeling invisible because the well-heeled patrons ignore him.

For the art work, I was thinking about an exhibition that a mother and son could both relate to. When I was a child, every Sunday I would sit in church underneath the Stations of the Cross and then, after Mass, we would go home and I would watch cartoons. The experiences are jumbled in my mind, and the Stations become a story told over many single-frame images, just like any comic book. Growing up, no members of my family would ever have thought to take me to an art gallery, because they themselves felt unwelcome in those spaces. Like many children, religious art provided my only exposure to painting, and, when I think of my formative years and what has formed my own queer aesthetic, it is the religious iconography I stared up at mixed with the wild Technicolor of cartoon superheroes. It felt natural to create an artist for whom sexuality, religion, and childhood were intertwined. This mixing of the sacred and the camp led me to think of the French artists Pierre et Gilles; the American artist Andres Serrano; and then Cicciolina, the porn star, Jeff Koons muse, and politician. From there, my Italian sculptor emerged.

Jack, the narrator, is Scottish. His husband, David, is an American and a member of the museum’s curatorial team. David is mainly seen from a distance. We spend far more time with Jack’s mother, Jean, who is visiting from Glasgow. Did you always know that Jean would be in the foreground and David the background?

Yes. I wanted to write about the push and pull of an old life versus a new one, or about the different worlds a person straddles when they belong to one social class but are asked to fit into another. There’s a strange pain there, a tension that is worth exploring, and I think many of us who migrate to the big city often wonder, would my family fit in with this new life I’m building?

My own life does not feel like one continuous thing but, rather, two distinct halves that belong to two very different people. I grew up in Glasgow under Thatcherism, when the city deindustrialized too rapidly, working men were cast onto the slag heap of progress, and mass unemployment destroyed the prospects of multiple generations. A free education saved my life and brought me to New York, where I now spend my days surrounded by books and art. It’s almost unbelievable to me. My mother cleaned shopping centers, my granny was an understairs maid, and they worked so hard to insure that I was the first person in my family to finish high school.

I can hardly reconcile myself into a single human, and I worry that the boy I was would not recognize the man I have become. I wanted Jack to be caught between these two things, with his mother representing his true self, and his husband indicating the world he has stepped into.

Jack and David have quite different backgrounds, not just in terms of nationality but also class. Jack grew up in an impoverished single-parent household and David is from a wealthy Texan family. How do they cope with these differences? Is this a particularly tense time for them?

A relationship like this, where lovers come from opposite ends of the social spectrum, would be very fraught in the U.K. That’s probably why class-crossed lovers make such fertile ground for fiction—look at Heathcliff and Cathy, or poor Scudder and Maurice.

On the surface, things seem more fluid in America, but that is only the surface. As someone who immigrated to America, I thought I had escaped the worst limitations of class structures, but the longer I live here the less I think that is true. I came to America in 1996, and at first it felt really liberating. No one asked me what school I went to, or what my parents did for a living. People would ask where I was from, and then, having no real idea where Scotland was, that would mostly be the end of it. But what was liberating was also erasing.

I’m sure class will be a constant undercurrent in their relationship, mostly because, as David says, Jack has a chip on his shoulder and he can never “shut the fuck up about oppression.” But, thankfully, there’s something in Americans whereby they not only tolerate but seem rather fond of British people. I must say, I have a few very average-looking British friends who have reaped huge romantic benefits from that perversion.

Partway through the story, the reader learns something that upends our understanding of what’s going on. Did you know Jean’s status from the outset? Or did the revelation come as a surprise to you, too, as you were writing?

I wrote the first draft with Jean being a very real person, but, as time went on, I realized I wasn’t addressing the grief that was propelling the story. I was raised by an incredible single mother who lost her struggle with addiction when I was sixteen years old. Now, in my forties, I find I am still grieving. Many children of addicts feel that they could have done more to save their parents. As kids, we often feel somehow responsible for their addiction and that if only we were funnier, quieter, tidier, or better at school, then perhaps our parents wouldn’t drink as much as they do. Obviously, that is not how addiction works, and the issue is never with the child, but we often can’t help but think that way. I imagine Jack would feel that, if he’d never come to New York, if he’d only remained in Glasgow, then perhaps he could have saved his mother’s life. I think Jean haunts him in this way.

I say my mother drank herself to death, but it was poverty that really killed her. I was raised on the equivalent of forty-five dollars a week. Now, as a working adult, I have a little more than that, enough at least to improve my own life and, if my mother were alive, to be able to provide for her, too. I carry an enormous amount of guilt, and I imagine that Jack, walking through galleries filled with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of modern art, does too.

Is talking to Jean in his head a way for Jack to keep her alive? Will he be able to give this up? Is this part of a process of grieving or one of denial?

I don’t think Jack is in any sort of denial. It can be such a solitary experience when you’re grieving a parent but are in a relationship with someone who still has both of theirs. I think Jack is going through something that David is unable to understand.

Jack finds great comfort in spending time with Jean. There’s an honesty to her, and he feels understood in a way that he doesn’t by David. Jean knows both the old and the new versions of him, and throughout the story she acts as a mirror and tells him the truths he doesn’t want to admit.

I spent most of my twenties in New York encountering things I’d never been exposed to before—things like eating at a nice restaurant, going to the opera, or just staying in a hotel. I would often feel a great sadness amid all my excitement, because all I wanted to do was to share these experiences with my mother. Even now, I spend a lot of time daydreaming and trying to picture her on the 6 train or just walking over the Williamsburg Bridge with me. She would have loved New York.

Did writing the story make you think about what it’s like to be married to a writer?

It was a chance to admit to an annoying truth. See, I live in a small New York apartment, and so I write at my kitchen table—if you could call that room a kitchen, considering I’m not much of a cook. I wear noise-cancelling headphones so that my husband can go about his day. But, when I write, I speak every word out loud because writing is so much about rhythm. I didn’t know how irritating this was until my husband finally had enough and started recording videos of me doing it. I look like I’m possessed. It drives him out of his mind.

In May, you’re publishing your third novel, “John of John,” which is set on an island in the Hebrides. In 2020, we published your story “The Englishman,” in which a young Hebridean man travels to London. You mentioned then that you’d spent some time in the Outer Hebrides while you were researching a novel. Is “John of John” the result? What was it like to conjure up the landscape and people of the Hebrides?

“The Englishman” provided the first spark for “John of John,” so thank you for publishing it. I have written two novels, “Shuggie Bain” and “Young Mungo,” about the queer working-class experience, but I realized we often overlook rural lives in any conversations about class or political upheaval. In 2019, I went to the Outer Hebrides for the first time, thinking that I might write a novel, but, if that failed, then at least I would come to understand my own country a little better. I spent sixteen weeks gathering research, and travelled up the archipelago from island to island. The moment I arrived on the barren, almost lunar landscape of the east coast of Harris, I knew I had found the setting. Harris is a beautiful, singular place, where many fascinating things converge.

One of the challenges of this new novel was matching its heartbeat to the rhythm of the islands. Nothing happens quickly, and anything that happens is remembered forever. Life is governed by the seasons, and by the changing, often very harsh, weather. Crofting and sheep farming set the daily rhythms, but there’s also a strict church calendar. The islands are home to a very conservative branch of Calvinism which believes deeply in the Sabbath. All work stops, all recreation stops, and everyone turns to God. There’s an absolute silence that descends on a Sunday, and, whether you’re a believer or not, you’re expected to respect it. Underpinning everything is the patient rhythm of a place with a long intergenerational memory. People are very considerate with their words and actions, because they’ll live with the consequences for many, many years. Before I could even begin to write the characters, I had to think about time in a way I hadn’t before.

You studied textile design and spent many years in the fashion business. In “A Private View,” clothes are clearly very important to Jack. In “John of John,” the protagonist’s father is a sheep farmer and a weaver of tweed. What’s it like to think about clothing and textiles from the perspective of a fiction writer?

The discipline required by textiles would be useful training for any writer. Textiles are a lesson in building something from nothing, and you have to be hyper-focussed on the most minute detail. You spend endless hours in the repetitive act of laying one small thing after the other, while also having to be able to stand back and envision the over-all design. Occasionally, when it all goes horribly wrong, you have to find the fault and mend it, or rip it all out and start again. For me, creating cloth can be a lot like writing a story.

When writing, I often think of clothing as I’m building a character. Clothes are so deeply psychological. They hold shame and aspiration, function and desire. They tell us who a person is and who they hope to be. They tell us how a character feels about their body and also what they hope to reveal or conceal from those around them.

I suppose it was inevitable that I was going to write a novel about textiles. In “John of John,” it felt exciting to celebrate working-class men who created something beautiful for a living. It’s far removed from the coal miners of “Shuggie Bain.” Every step of the tweed-weaving is fascinating. I loved having the opportunity to capture all the creativity and sensitivity of that job. I love how the weavers take their inspiration from the landscape, and how they spend decades refining their craft. It felt a little overdue to have working men talk about beauty and color and refinement. I could spend hours in an old tin weave shed watching a weaver work. It’s certainly more visually interesting than watching a writer mutter to himself. ♦