In Conversation: On Shuggie Bain

Garrard Conley is the creator and producer of the podcast UnErased, which explores the history of conversion therapy in America through interviews, historical documents, and archival materials provided by the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. His work can be found in publications such as The New York Times, TIME, VICE, CNN, BuzzFeed, Them, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Huffington Post. The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality. When he was a nineteen-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to “cure” him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life. He was supposed to emerge heterosexual, ex-gay, cleansed of impure urges and stronger in his faith in God for his brush with sin. Instead, he found the strength and understanding to break out in search of his true self and forgiveness. His memoir Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith, and Family (Riverhead Books) traces the complex relationships among family, faith, and community. The Los Angeles Times noted that “The power of Conley’s story resides not only in the vividly depicted grotesqueries of the therapy system, but in his lyrical writing about sexuality and love, and his reflections on the Southern family and culture that shaped

Douglas Stuart was born and raised in Glasgow. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in London, he moved to New York City, where he began a career in fashion design. His short stories, ‘Found Wanting,’ and ‘The Englishman,’ have been published by The New Yorker magazine. His writing on Gender, Class and Anxiety was featured on Lit Hub. Shuggie Bain is his first novel. Bain is shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. Shuggie Bain (Grove Press) is the story of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher’s policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city’s notorious drugs epidemic is about to explode. Shuggie’s mother Agnes is both a guiding light but also a burden for him and his siblings. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes orders a little happiness on credit, keeps her pride by looking good but increasingly finds solace in drinking. Agnes’s older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Shuggie is meanwhile struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is “no right,” a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her—even her beloved