Pod Insights The Oprah Podcast Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club About this episode BUY THE BOOK!
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As part of the 30th anniversary of Oprah’s Book Club, Oprah picks her 123rd selection: John of John by celebrated Scottish author Douglas Stuart. His other novels include Young Mungo and Shuggie Bain which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2020. John of John is set in a small, fictional farming and textile town, Falabay, on an isle off northern Scotland where everybody knows everyone’s business. The story centers around three generations living under the same roof: a father, his son and the son's grandmother. The central theme to this enthralling book is the secrets these three so desperately hold on to: secrets from each other, from their neighbors and from the church. A love story at its heart, Douglas Stuart tells Oprah how he spent six years writing this book, spending 16 weeks researching the Outer Hebrides Isles on the northwest coast of Scotland talking to local people who inspired his 26 supporting characters. Oprah and Douglas Stuart are joined by an audience in New York City who enthusiastically read the book and have questions for the author.
00:00:00 - Welcome Douglas Stuart, author of “John of John”
00:03:01 - The setting of the book
00:04:05 - Where he found this story
00:07:30 - What Douglas needed to learn to write “John of John”
00:09:20 - Douglas describes “John of John”
00:11:43 - Oprah compares the book to Heated Rivalry
00:13:30 - An unexpected love story
00:17:40 - The conflict between father and son
00:20:40 - His writing process
00:25:55 - Father and gay son on “John of John”
00:30:30 - How man found acceptance of his son
00:34:20 - Feeling seen in a novel
00:38:27 - What Douglas wants the reader to feel
00:44:50 - Masculinity and the patriarchy
00:46:10 - The experience of growing up gay
00:47:20 - The end of the novel
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Transcript 9,639 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Oprah Winfrey? This is Oprah as an Oprah woman. Ah, hi. Is there any other Oprah? I'm calling about John of John. John of John! Oh my God! I'm calling and I want to choose it as a book club. Oh my God, that's amazing. You must have had some people hang up on you for the years not believing it was really you. This is a real pinch game moment. I thought this was so interesting in light of heated rivalry and all that's going on with that.
0:34 Oprah Winfrey? If you liked heated rivalry, you're gonna love this book. Okay? That's all I got to say. This is the deeper end of the ocean of heated rivalry.
0:48 Oprah Winfrey? Hi, everybody. I am so happy to be here with you on the Oprah Podcast because today is my favorite kind of day because I'm with an audience of readers.
1:02 Oprah Winfrey? We are all reading people. And I know that book clubs are all the rage now. And when I first started doing it, nobody had a book club. And the idea of doing a book club, certainly publicly, was like, how are you gonna get people to read? And now, look, everybody has a book club. I'm 30 years in and I'm so excited to share with you my 123rd Oprah's Book Club selection. 123!
1:32 Oprah Winfrey? John of John by the extraordinary novelist Douglas Stewart. You may have read or heard of his wildly acclaimed debut novel, Shooky Vane. That was so good, which won the prestigious Booker Prize. But I was so immersed in this book that at times I had to put on a sweater.
1:52 Oprah Winfrey? Because Scotland gets cold sometimes. And so we gave our audience an advance copy and I wanted to know what you thought. Allison?
2:01 Speaker 01 Thank you for having me. Thank you for this book. You wrote with such a thoughtful and delicate hand that these complex characters truly became human. I was lucky enough to spend a year in Scotland and through reading this book, I was transported back.
2:18 Oprah Winfrey? Really? So you knew the terrain?
2:21 Speaker 01 Yes, I had been up to the Isle of Skye and to the Highlands before.
2:25 Oprah Winfrey? So you knew what a croft house was?
2:27 Speaker 01 No, I didn't know that, but I had I had run around and chased sheep around the hillsides.
2:33 Oprah Winfrey? OK, all right, Susanna?
2:35 Speaker 02 Your characters were so well-developed. I got to the end of the book and honestly, I was disappointed to leave them. I could have easily spent another 400 pages with John, Cal, Ella and Innes.
2:47 Speaker 03 Thank you so much.
2:48 Oprah Winfrey? Wow, thank you. So John of John is set in a small fictional farming and textile town. Didn't you learn so much about textiles? Yes, and Douglas is wearing one of the Scotland textiles.
3:00 Speaker 03 Very hot for a studio, but yes.
3:03 Oprah Winfrey? OK, so it's set in this town called Follabey, where people do these textiles on an aisle off of Scotland, where everybody knows everybody else's business. It's a story about a father, John, and his son, John Calem, who goes by Cal, and the secrets they so desperately are holding on to from each other, from their neighbors, from their church. Boy, this book has a lot, everybody has a secret. So we welcome you, Douglas Stewart. Bravo, bravo, bravo, sir.
3:34 Speaker 03 Thank you, and thank you for having me.
3:36 Oprah Winfrey? Well, you know, I asked an author this recently and they said, "I wrote the book that was inside me to write." So has this book, the words, been living inside you? This story, was it living inside you? And obviously, it came out in the form of John of John. But how did it come about?
3:53 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I think it's always been inside. I mean, I think in many ways it was inevitable. Although I'm not an islander myself, I think I had been drawn to the islands because I was a young man who had studied textiles in college. And I'd always really revered this community that makes this beautiful cloth and and I had wanted to go. But before I published my debut novel in twenty nineteen, it takes about eighteen months between someone accepting a book and then it being published. And I was thinking, what am I going to write next? What do I want to work on? And I think I was making my husband absolutely insane. With my anxiety, how will this book do? What's going to happen? And so I said to him, I have to, I have to go. I'm being called to the islands. I have to go and see what it is. And he said.
4:37 Oprah Winfrey? So had Sugar Bean already come out?
4:39 Speaker 03 No, it hadn't. It still had maybe about six months to go. And so I was thinking, I was trying to keep myself busy with my work.
4:46 Oprah Winfrey? Because also the pressure, once you've had the success of a Booker Prize, it puts even more pressure on you, does it not?
4:53 Speaker 03 Yeah.
4:54 Oprah Winfrey? For the next book, or do you feel that pressure?
4:56 Speaker 03 Oh, you, you, I mean, I didn't feel the pressure before the book published, but certainly afterwards.
5:00 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah, now you gotta really write.
5:01 Speaker 03 Yeah. And in fact, journalists would say, congratulations. And is your next book gonna fail? You know, it was sort of always success, like failure was baked into success and you couldn't even enjoy the moment. So I said to my husband, I want to go to and explore the Outer Hebrides, which is this beautiful archipelago off the northwest of Scotland. I had never been. And he was like.
5:21 Oprah Winfrey? But you sound like you have.
5:23 Speaker 03 And he said, absolutely go. You know, he was delighted to get rid of me.
5:26 Oprah Winfrey? So where were you, where were you born? Where were you born and raised?
5:28 Speaker 03 I was born, so Scotland's quite a small country, but I was born in Glasgow, which is the big industrial city and actually the most populous city. So I was born and raised as an inner city kid. And and because I was born, you know, my family didn't have much money. I never really got to see all the beautiful wildlife and the Highlands and the nature that Scotland has. And I certainly never got to visit our many, many beautiful islands. And I've lived my whole life when as soon as I opened my mouth, someone would say, oh, I've been to the Isle of Skye, I've been to the Isle of Harris. And I would say, oh, I haven't, I haven't done that. And so this also for me was about writing myself into my own country and sort of discovering my own nation in a way. And so I went for 12 weeks in 2019 and it was before I'd published my debut novel, I knew two people on the islands.
6:12 Speaker 03 I actually only knew one and I had been introduced to another. And, you know, everyone was just so warm and so welcoming with me.
6:19 Oprah Winfrey? Did you stay there? Did you live there?
6:21 Speaker 03 I did. I started, it's a chain of islands and I started at the very southern tip. And I thought I was going to write a novel about loneliness. And then I thought, maybe it's about a prodigal son's return home. And as I traveled up, all the islands are very different. They have a very different character. And when I got about three quarters of the way up to the Isle of Harris, I suddenly was on the east coast of it and it's a very lunar landscape. It's very rocky, quite barren. The houses feel quite lonely on the landscape.
6:48 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah, because I think, and you all would agree, I'm sure, the setting in the book is a character itself, is it not? Yeah.
6:55 Speaker 03 I mean, it's absolutely stunning. The beaches and the landscape and the houses are incredible. But it's also a place where some very singular things converge. One of them is the Gaelic language. Another one is a very devout form of Calvinism and the last is Harris Tweed weaving. And as soon as I got there, I just suddenly thought, this is it. This is where the book is set.
7:15 Oprah Winfrey? So you actually saw people doing that weaving that you described in the book?
7:19 Speaker 03 I did. They do, and their homes are behind their homes and I absolutely fell in love. But I only knew two people, as I said, and I had to know everything about, learn everything about sheep farming and about the reproductive cycles and about when you can launch a boat and when you can't. So I would go and I would say, if I needed to know something, they would say, yeah, yeah, just go and talk to the person at the far end of the village. Just go chap the door. And as a New Yorker, I didn't like that as a strategy. But I did and I was admitted and I came away with over 100 hours of audio recordings, just people talking to me.
7:50 Oprah Winfrey? And what were they sharing? They were sharing about what was going on in their daily lives. If you stayed there a long period of time, you would have under-- you became to understand yourself. You know, how isolated or removed. I know people don't like the word, they use "remote", but how isolated or removed it was and how it did feel when I was reading that there was a lot of loneliness there.
8:15 Speaker 03 I think my characters experienced a lot of loneliness. You know, there's a wonderful quote that opens the novel, and it's by a very famous Protestant minister. And he says, you know, "Islanders the world over are born for exile. Islands give us such a privileged childhood, but then when we grow up, they give us no place to express that." And I think that was, you know, a very sort of powerful feeling that I got when I was on the islands. They have suffered some massive depopulation over the last century. They've lost about 40% of their population. And the population often that is there in the more rural corners can be aging.
8:51 Oprah Winfrey? Older, yeah, because the young people want to get out.
8:53 Speaker 03 Yeah, they do. And so there's a little bit of pre-grief with parents as well. You know, they understand that if their children are going to go out into the world, they have to give them to the world and won't see them as often as they'd like.
9:04 Oprah Winfrey? So, without giving the plot away, especially, you know, you're not going to give the ending away. My producer was in tears reading it. We all were so moved by the ending, but you got to get there. Tell us about John of John.
9:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's set in the late 90s on the Isle of Harris, but--
9:21 Oprah Winfrey? You did that on purpose?
9:22 Speaker 03 I did that on purpose. I set that before the internet, which will become clear as you read the book. But it's set in the--
9:28 Oprah Winfrey? Because if everybody was on their phones, this would be a very different story.
9:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly, exactly. If you could find someone to date really quickly, it'd be--
9:35 Oprah Winfrey? Yes, yeah, yeah.
9:36 Speaker 03 Wouldn't even be a short story, yes.
9:38 Oprah Winfrey? No need to knit your penis.
9:41 Speaker 03 Spoiler alert, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Well, you could still do that if it's fun for you, but, but yeah. But yeah, and so it's, it's a story of a young man who is on the mainland and at art school. His name is John Callum McLeod. We call him Cal. And in that wonderful moment of graduation, he is down on his luck. He can't find work and he's having a tough time getting by in the capital city. And he calls home every Wednesday and Sunday to worship with his father back to the Isle of Harris. And one day, his father says to him, "You have to come home. It's time." And it's that wonderful moment where a young man should just be going out into the world and suddenly he's pulled back to his home. And so he returns to this island, which is quite difficult to get to. It takes a lot of intent.
10:24 Speaker 03 And he's told his grandmother is very ill and he must come home and care for her. That his grandmother is his responsibility because it's his father's mother-in-law, not his father's mother. And so he does his duty and he comes home and it brings him back into a world where he has a lot of broken relationships and unfinished business. But it also brings him back under his father's roof. And his father is what is known as a deacon or a presenter in the local church, meaning he sets the hymn and the congregation sings it back to him. And he believes very deeply in scripture. He does not negotiate with it and he has very sort of strict rules for the house. And so Cal comes home. He finds, I don't think it's a spoiler, he finds almost instantly that his grandmother is in great health.
11:05 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
11:05 Speaker 03 And, and so she's the same as she ever was and...
11:09 Oprah Winfrey? So he's been falsely lured back home.
11:12 Speaker 03 For some reason that we will discover, yes.
11:14 Oprah Winfrey? And Cal is coming home with a secret.
11:16 Speaker 03 That's right.
11:16 Oprah Winfrey? And he goes home and his dad also has a secret.
11:19 Speaker 03 That's right, yes.
11:21 Oprah Winfrey? We're not telling the secrets?
11:22 Speaker 03 We can tell the, the secrets, I think.
11:24 Oprah Winfrey? Okay, because it's really early on that you find out.
11:27 Speaker 03 That's right, yeah.
11:27 Oprah Winfrey? And I thought this was so interesting in, in light of heated rivalry and all that's going on with that. If you liked heated rivalry, you're gonna love this book. All right, that's all I got to say. This is, this is the deeper end of the ocean of a rivalry. And so Cal is gay and holding the shame of that for himself because he knows he's not going to be received in that community.
11:51 Speaker 03 That's right.
11:52 Oprah Winfrey? And his father, the deacon, is gay.
11:56 Speaker 03 That's right.
11:57 Oprah Winfrey? Yes, that, but you find that like 20 pages in, that's what is happening. He's coming home to that.
12:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
12:02 Oprah Winfrey? And, and then all that happens with that.
12:05 Speaker 03 That's right. And strangely enough, I thought it was really just the story of a gay son returning to the islands. And when I was meeting with islanders, I would go from settlement to settlement. And in every sort of little village, I would hear the history of who lived there. And there would be some spinsters or there would be some bachelors, some unmarried older people. And I would ask, you know, oh, sort of what happened? And the conversation often was that person missed their moment for love, you know? They, they just didn't find somebody to love. They missed their moment. Sometimes the story would be, oh, he looked after his mother and father into old age and/or, you know, he really didn't want to be bothered with the opposite sex. And I was listening to this for like a couple of weeks. And then I would say, and I said very casually, well, of course, some of them must also be gay.
12:49 Speaker 03 And the woman that I said it to said, oh, no, oh, no, no, no. And she didn't say it with any cruelty or malintent, but because faith was very important, they couldn't believe that. And I, and I knew just instinctively in my heart that some of these men and women, these older men and women would have, would have been gay and just had never.
13:05 Oprah Winfrey? You can't have a whole town.
13:06 Speaker 03 No.
13:07 Oprah Winfrey? And not have anybody.
13:08 Speaker 03 That's exactly so, yeah.
13:09 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah, to be gay, you just can't.
13:10 Speaker 03 You just cannot. And that's when the book for me became much more interesting. I realized it wasn't really about the son, but it is also about his father and what we inherit from our parents.
13:19 Oprah Winfrey? Okay, so that's when you decided to allow him to be gay and also the father, who is the deacon, is holding this, this secret. Now, what is interesting to me is I started out reading it and I didn't know that I was reading a love story, but it becomes very evident that.
13:39 Oprah Winfrey? It's a love story. It's a love story in ways that we did not expect. Did you know that yourself, that it was gonna be a love story?
13:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, I do. I think in all my novels, no matter what I throw at my characters, I'm always testing the strength of the love, whether that's between a mother and son, or two teenage boys, or in this case, between, you know, a grandson and grandmother, and a son and a father. And also the patience of love for some other characters. But yeah, I always knew it was going to be a love story. I didn't have a father myself. My father abandoned my mother and I when I was about four years old. And so I've always grown up thinking, what must it be to have a father's love? And what would that have been? And what would it have meant for me as a young gay man as well? Who had, the father that I did have, you know, was really a product of the patriarchy. And I always sort of spent time imagining that.
14:30 Speaker 03 In a way, I wrote John of John to sort of breathe life into that idea, and to imagine these two on this island. But, you know, of the title, the important word on the title is "the of", because it is about how fathers possess sons and how they, and often seek to control them. When you're on the island, you know, names are very common, family names repeat. There's a lot of McDonald's and McLeod's and McNeil's. And then you're often named after your father and mother. And so the very first question someone might ask you is, you know, who are you? But then the very next question needs to be, and who do you belong to? And that sense of who do you belong to was something that can carry an awful lot of weight
15:13 Speaker 03 through your whole entire life, because you've also got to show up and represent yourself in a good light, but also all the generations going back, because everybody remembers who you're from.
15:24 Oprah Winfrey? Yes, and that's the pressure that Cal feels coming home, that you're not allowed to be yourself. And that's also why I'm sure so many people leave the island, for the desire to fulfill who you were meant to be, and not to be somebody else's idea of who you are.
15:40 Speaker 03 That's right, that's right, yeah. And also for a 22-year-old man to come back, the island does have a very busy city, or a very busy town of about 8,000 people. But they live, it's quite a big island, and they live in a very rural part of it. And for a 22-year-old man to return home at that time, you know, he says, a couple of chapters in, he meets another character, and he says, "You're the first person I've seen under 30", and he's been there a while. And so there is also a little bit of a... A social and a romantic struggle, even for straight people on the islands, to find the person that they will fall in love with, and almost impossible in that time for a gay character.
16:17 Oprah Winfrey? OK, so a thread throughout the story is this struggle between faith and desire. What did you find in that struggle? Faith and desire?
16:27 Speaker 03 Yeah. I mean, I think it's an eternal struggle, isn't it? And I don't know that I could necessarily come to a place where I could resolve it, because I think it will go on long beyond this novel. You know, it is a community that believes very deeply in God. And when you're on the landscape and you see the wind and the weather and the sea, you can understand that God is here. We're very close to it, unlike we often are in cities. But it is also a very conservative church. And it does, as I said, believes very deeply in scripture and does not negotiate with it. And so to be gay or to be outside of any relationship that is not one man and one woman is just not something that really can exist. And yet, you have these two men and probably other people in rural situations like that, that have, this is how they were born.
17:12 Speaker 03 This is how they were made. And so the struggle becomes not only sort of with the community, but it also becomes inside self. You know, it's about how can you both love God and love yourself and love who you love? And how can you reconcile those things at the same time?
17:28 Oprah Winfrey? I love it on page 23, where you describe the conflicting relationship between father and son. You say, although he never said it out loud, John felt that Cal thought their lives were lacking, as if the things that had sustained him as a boy bored him now. Cal's gaze tainted the things that John had always loved and made him feel like he should apologize for the life he had built. And you later write, John thought about the life that he had tied himself to so that Cal had something to tie himself to. And now that Cal didn't want it, he realized that he hadn't wanted it either.
18:09 Speaker 03 Yeah. Yeah, I have, I think I have a lot of empathy for parents, I think. I think often they build lives and perhaps there comes a moment where you realize your children don't want that life, or they don't want to continue that life for you. And especially on the islands where, you know, the crafting of the farming is about subsistence. It's not for profit, it's about maintaining and remaining and, and living there. So if your child then doesn't want this thing that you've sort of held on to the house and the land all this time, you have to question, did you also want it?
18:42 Speaker 03 And, and John hasn't been able to be the man he wanted to be because he was the upstanding deacon in this, in this settlement, there's only 26 people, Oprah, you know, it's not, it's, it's, it's very depopulated at this point. And so he, he feels like he owes not only his existence there to his son and also to his mother-in-law to, to keep her alive and well, but also to the people around him. You know, you cannot, at a certain point, you cannot leave because the community needs you.
19:07 Oprah Winfrey? So this, this struck me, this is early on, this is just on page two, y'all. You, you write about John and Cal and you say, "Their conversation was always censored, missing the things they couldn't talk about." And what's fascinating to me about that and struck me is that I think a lot of people are in relationships, having conversations that are censored, missing the things that you really can't talk about. And it felt like that wasn't just John and Cal, it felt to me like that's the whole community, everybody's just having conversations, but really missing the things that come from feeling and, and that you need to talk about.
19:50 Speaker 03 That's right, I think we're always all managing reputation, uh, no matter who we are and where we are.
19:55 Oprah Winfrey? First of all, let's just talk about that sentence, that is a beautiful sentence.
19:58 Speaker 03 Thank you, thank you.
19:59 Oprah Winfrey? And so you're just writing along.
20:04 Oprah Winfrey? And that just sentence just comes to you?
20:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, I sort of do a little more crying and sort of struggling than just writing along. But yeah, I mean, I have a love of language and it's very much in Scottish people, I think. We love a good story, so.
20:19 Oprah Winfrey? So, but when you finish that sentence, you say, "Ah, that's a good one."
20:23 Speaker 03 No, you tend to think, "Oh, that's terrible and, you know, will I ever survive?"
20:28 Oprah Winfrey? Really?
20:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, I'm very hard on myself.
20:30 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah, what's your writing style? Do you get up and write every morning or are you on a computer or are you, you know?
20:35 Speaker 03 I'm very slow. The first draft tends to be very quick and then I'm meeting people as the reader meets people. And the reason why I write, I think, is also to understand the things that bother me that I can't quite locate.
20:46 Oprah Winfrey? You're meeting people as the reader meets, as we?
20:47 Speaker 03 As, yes, yeah, they're also coming to me or they're coming from inside me. But I also know in my first draft that I meet Ella and I meet Cal and I say, "Who are you? And what are you going to be? What do you have to tell me?"
21:00 Oprah Winfrey? And so does that come through your fingers or they're talking in your head? How does that show up?
21:04 Speaker 03 It comes through my head. I mumble, I talk all the time. I write in a one-bedroom apartment in the East Village and I have a pair of noise-canceling headphones and my husband just goes about his business around me all the time.
21:16 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
21:17 Speaker 03 But yeah, I meet the characters on the first draft and then I find what it is that bothers them.
21:24 Oprah Winfrey? This always fascinates me with all, so they just sort of like come in and they say, "Hi, I'm Ella."
21:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, they do. I have a vague outline of who they might be, but if you try to impose too much of that on them, they can resist it and they can push back. And I think because so many of them come from a place where they're trying to help me work out my own problems and things that sort of malformed me in my childhood, I am sort of drawing them from a very deep place and...
21:48 Oprah Winfrey? So in this book, 26 characters, they just kept coming and coming?
21:51 Speaker 03 Yes. It's a noisy head, what can I tell you? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
21:56 Oprah Winfrey? Did you finally say, "Is that, is that everybody?"
21:58 Speaker 03 Yeah. I had to limit 26, so I was like, "Thank goodness for depopulation."
22:03 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah. Time for a quick break. Up next, we're going to hear from book club readers, including a pastor who once wrote in his journal how much he hated homosexuality. He's now here with his gay son. Their story gets to the heart of what it means to change your mind. That is next.
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22:48 Oprah Winfrey? Welcome back to the Oprah Podcast. We're celebrating 30 years, 30 years, people, of Oprah's Book Club, my book club. I am so thankful to all the readers who have joined me along the way. I'm talking to award-winning author Douglas Stewart, whose latest novel, John of John, is a vivid, captivating must-read and is giving some heated rivalry vibes. Also, it's my 123rd book club selection. Let's get back to our conversation. So John is a man of God, as we read in John of John. He has deep struggles between faith and desire. And this is what Cal says about his father on page 279. Oh, I love this so much.
23:32 Oprah Winfrey? "I didn't leave him, I left home. I didn't leave him, I left home. And he left me first. He looked at me, and he looked at Jesus, and he chose Jesus. He stepped beyond that white cloth to be saved and left me on the other side. I was nine years old, so I'm chained to his side in this life, but to hell with me in the next." Where did you learn and experience yourself about the church in Scotland?
24:05 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think I went to the islands with a lot of misconceptions and preconceived notions. I've always felt a sort of looked down upon, I think, of people of faith because I was a young gay man. And it was often used as the justification for people to be cruel to me, you know, how God felt about me. And they felt very sort of righteous in that often. And so I went, actually a little afraid, this being the most conservative part of Scotland. And I got there and I was so overwhelmed with the softness and the gentleness of the people, with just how generous they were with me and with their neighbors and and how interdependent they were in order to sort of get by and to survive. But the faith they believe in their own path to God is quite a hard path.
24:48 Speaker 03 You know, we're born in sin, we are going for damnation and God will save only a few and there's we can give ourselves to Jesus, but there's not much else we can do to.
25:00 Oprah Winfrey? And no radio on Sunday?
25:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, no, I mean, they are very, I mean, it's a hard agricultural life. And so the Sabbath comes as a very welcome relief at the end of the week where everyone can rest. But it is intended that you give your your whole day to God. There is no labor, there is no joining together unless it is for worship or to go to church. And even though not everyone is a part of the church on the islands, the church still has the dominating influence in that region. And and to be there also on a Sunday, as a city dweller, I was like, we might need this, you know, might need a chance to stop and to think and to reflect for whatever it is we do, but it's it is a very sort of dominating experience.
25:43 Oprah Winfrey? You know what it felt like to me in reading it? It feels, I was brought up, you know, strict Baptist. And it's so interesting because at one point, you know, you're not supposed to wear pants on a Sunday, you're not supposed to wear jewelry, you're not supposed to do. And, you know, it just seems so crazy to me. You could go in the water, but you couldn't splash, you know? So it was like, take away all the joy. And that's what it felt like in this community, that religion was joyless.
26:16 Speaker 03 I think I think it's the religion is hard. The road to belief there is very, very hard. But the community itself has a lot of joy.
26:23 Oprah Winfrey? A lot of joy.
26:24 Speaker 03 Yeah, because it is very sort of soft and gentle, like I said. And people are very measured with their words because words live a long time on the islands. And so it was that sort of tension between both of them that just really sort of inspired me and scratched my imagination.
26:39 Oprah Winfrey? Okay, so. Maybe you've heard of this story that last year in the New York Times opinion piece, Timothy White wrote an article titled, "How My Dad Reconciled His God and His Gay Son." His father is an evangelical pastor who eventually came to terms with Timothy's sexuality. And Timothy and his father, Bill, are here, and they both read John of John. Yeah, and what did you think?
27:03 Speaker 05 Oh, wow.
27:06 Oprah Winfrey? Well, first of all, wow for that article.
27:07 Speaker 06 Yeah.
27:08 Oprah Winfrey? Wow for that article.
27:09 Speaker 05 Thank you. I mean, I think for me, it was heartbreaking, honestly, to see myself in it as much as I did. I mean, we have a different-- Timothy and I have a very different relationship than John and Cal.
27:21 Speaker 06 Thank goodness.
27:23 Speaker 05 We would not be sitting here.
27:26 Oprah Winfrey? Well, tell us first a little bit, summarize what you said in the opinion piece in the New York Times, yes?
27:30 Speaker 06 Yeah, so I wrote about what it was like to grow up as someone who had a father that loved him very dearly and placed a lot of expectations about what it would mean when I was an adult, the wife I would marry. I wrote about how in the doorway every night when I went to bed, my dad would say prayers over me. One of those prayers was for my future wife every night. And so then, when I came out, and in the lead up to me coming out, my dad and I were very close. He was going through this internal theological struggle this whole time about what it was like to try to reconcile his deeply held evangelical faith, faith that I was raised in and believed as well, with my burgeoning sexuality.
28:08 Oprah Winfrey? And I read that-- Bill, in your journal, you wrote, "I think, deep down, I hate homosexuality. I hate it more than just about anything in the world." That's what you had written, right?
28:18 Speaker 05 Yes, that's in my journals.
28:20 Oprah Winfrey? And after more than two decades, you now say, "Having a gay son is one of the best things that's ever happened to you."
28:26 Speaker 05 It is, it is, so.
28:30 Oprah Winfrey? You have been redeemed. What happened?
28:32 Speaker 05 Well, I mean, it's a-- I mean, speaking as someone who's, you know, I love Jesus. I think Jesus is the best. I still do. It's hard to change. It's hard to change deeply ingrained religious beliefs.
28:46 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
28:46 Speaker 05 And so for me, my brother came out as gay in 1990. So I'm reading this book and it's, you know, that's the same era. And I, I sent my brother a book called Coming Out of Homosexuality, like, How to Be Straight. Right? I mean, this, I prayed with, you know, I've been in ministry-
29:06 Oprah Winfrey? So when your brother came out, what was your reaction to your brother coming out in 1990?
29:11 Speaker 05 Well, fortunately, I said, "I love you." Unfortunately, I said, "But." "I love you, but I'm not so sure what I think about you being gay." Because at that point, I thought it was just an abomination. Because I didn't literally know any gay people. I mean, it just was not part of the conservative evangelical world that I lived in.
29:32 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
29:32 Speaker 05 So I had to go on this journey.
29:34 Oprah Winfrey? So that was really brave of your brother to come to you, evangelical pastor, and do that.
29:39 Speaker 05 He pastored me through my journey. Even though he would say he's not religious, he literally walked with such humility and grace. For decades.
29:51 Oprah Winfrey? Okay, so when you wrote that in your journal all those years ago, "I hate homosexuality. I hate it more than just about anything in the world." What were you going through and why were you writing that?
30:02 Speaker 05 Well, I was praying for people who are gay to be straight.
30:05 Oprah Winfrey? And you thought you could pray them straight?
30:07 Speaker 05 Yes.
30:08 Oprah Winfrey? Okay.
30:08 Speaker 05 And that didn't work so well.
30:10 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah, well, it-
30:12 Speaker 05 So, I mean, it's no surprise to you, but it was to me. And so for me, it caused me to doubt God. Like, God, you, you said that I'm supposed to do this and make them straight, but you're not coming through. And so, for me, it was almost-
30:28 Oprah Winfrey? So when they didn't turn straight, you then started to question God?
30:30 Speaker 05 Yes.
30:31 Oprah Winfrey? Okay.
30:31 Speaker 05 And so I knew Timothy was gay probably a year before he came out.
30:36 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
30:36 Speaker 05 And so that's when I wrote that. I'm like, "This cannot be."
30:39 Oprah Winfrey? That now my son is gay, my brother was gay, and I heard that you went to the beach and you were throwing things and yelling at God?
30:45 Speaker 05 I mean, I was saying things that we cannot say on Oprah. And I was crying and yelling and throwing sand and stones out at the- And I was like, "God, what?"
30:57 Oprah Winfrey? So what happened? So what happened to change you?
31:01 Speaker 05 It's slow. Change is slow. But I think my therapist and I were talking about it a couple of weeks ago, that it's this combination of pain and love that motivates change. And I did not want to lose my beloved boy. And that's what it happened.
31:18 Oprah Winfrey? But you didn't lose him.
31:19 Speaker 05 No, I didn't. No.
31:21 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
31:21 Speaker 05 I thought I was going to, because that's what had happened with everyone else I loved who was gay.
31:25 Oprah Winfrey? Okay, so you saw yourself in the character John here.
31:29 Speaker 05 I did. He was so rigid.
31:31 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
31:31 Speaker 05 I mean, I know he loved Cal, but he was so rigid and so shame-based. There was so much self-loathing that the wrestling match, and you had that great line, you know, the wrestling match wasn't with another, it was with myself.
31:46 Speaker 03 That's right.
31:47 Speaker 05 And with the God that I thought was the real God. And Jesus ends up being a lot better than I thought he was.
31:57 Speaker 03 I love that.
32:02 Oprah Winfrey? And you say that because Jesus allowed you to be accepting and loving of your son just the way he was born to be.
32:14 Speaker 05 I think so. I mean, that, yes, because Jesus was that kind of loving with others. And Jesus was like, hey, come on, come over to my side.
32:21 Oprah Winfrey? Yes.
32:22 Speaker 05 It's okay. You can love him. You can really love him. God was not mad at me for being mad at God, right? So I was learning how to express that.
32:33 Oprah Winfrey? That has a lot going on.
32:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, pretty true.
32:36 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah, pretty true. So, reading this book did what for you, Timothy? How did the book impact you?
32:42 Speaker 06 Uh, I found the whole experience profoundly frustrating, I would say, in a way where I was just like, oh, you both have the same secret for the whole time. Like, someone say something.
32:55 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
32:55 Speaker 06 It felt like a Chekhov's gun, where if you see a gun at the beginning of the play, it has to go off by the end of the play. And I was like, waiting and waiting and waiting for that gun to go off. And I think what it did for me, there was a line near the end where... Cal and John are talking and Cal is saying in narration, thinking like, if he would only apologize just once, if he would just say that he was wrong one time, like, we could, we could make something of this. And so what it brought for me is just my profound gratitude that I got to experience something that very few children, very few gay children get to experience, which is their parent changing and largely changing out of a reaction of love for them. And so, yeah, I was grateful.
33:35 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah, that's wonderful. And I think you changed because, you changed because of your love for your son. It was so important for you to reconcile, that that's why you changed.
33:45 Speaker 05 And that day, I mean, that day at the, at the beach, I, I mean, I just told God, I said, "Look, I'm done. This is it. I'm gonna die on this hill. You are not gonna let my son drift off and not let us part."
33:57 Oprah Winfrey? So, did it come to you in a, in a feeling of release or relief?
34:01 Speaker 05 No, of intense anger.
34:03 Oprah Winfrey? No, but I mean, when you finally were able to reconcile that I can love my son the way Jesus wants me to love my son.
34:11 Speaker 05 Boy, just a long, slow journey. Yeah, a long, slow journey.
34:17 Oprah Winfrey? Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for being here to share it, Bill and Timothy. After this break, a former professional baseball player who says Douglas Stewart's novel, John of John, made him feel seen for the first time. His coming out story and more questions from our audience are next. Welcome back to the Oprah Podcast. I'm joined by an audience full of readers of my latest book club selection, John of John, by award-winning novelist Douglas Stewart. So Kenny is a former professional baseball player, and I heard the book made you feel seen. How so?
34:49 Speaker 07 It did make me feel seen. First, I just have to say that there's something profoundly healing in...
34:57 Speaker 07 Reading your words and affecting the chapters of my life through your words, through your lens. So, thank you for this book. It was really splendid.
35:05 Speaker 03 Thank you.
35:07 Speaker 07 You know, I really enjoyed how the characters were portrayed through, the relationships and dynamics through different perspectives.
35:18 Speaker 07 And the one that really struck a chord with me was the relationship between John and Cal, the strained father-son relationship with this dual secret. I've known that I'm gay since I was seven years old. And I came out when I was 21, and I couldn't take it anymore. It was just eating me from the inside. My father was outed, not as being gay, but as having a second family. And so, you know, it really illustrated like, wow. So, if I just kept my secret for a very long time, it would have exploded into this big thing. So, I, you know, felt this catharsis in seeing the other perspective
36:01 Speaker 07 and really empathized with the pain that he must have been going through. And, you know, throughout this all, it brought up the question of your intention and your hope for writing in this way. Like, you know, for me, I grew up in a patriarchal society. Like, it turns out we all did, like. And, you know, I'm trying to make sense of what it means to be a good man in a world that says that the kind of man that I am is never quite good enough. And so, you know, was it your hope and your intention to connect with readers like me? And like, I just want to know a little bit more about that.
36:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's a, thank you so much, all of you for your stories. Yeah, I think often I feel that I come from a generation of gay men where that's sort of been left behind by progress a little bit. I feel like because I write about life before the new century, that we don't often like to talk about what oppression was like and what violence and homophobia was like. And now that things are getting better, not for everybody, but they're improving all the time. I feel like the, sometimes the- The desire is to move towards the joy and the inclusion very quickly. And I want to just keep taking us back and saying, actually, the queer experience is
37:21 Speaker 03 universal and we often all felt very unloved and unseen and very hidden as children and as young people. And I, you know, I think it's also, certainly for me, I'm not sure about yourself, but certainly for me, as a working class kid, I feel like even literature and television doesn't talk about class as it intersects with queerness in many ways. It sort of tends to focus on a slightly more privileged life and the consequences change in every sort of part of class. And so a lot of my work is to say, well, look, it's very, very different if you don't have the options to move and to be different places and you aren't exposed to as many things as other people can be. And so I hope just by sort of telling that story that people can relate to it through their own experience.
38:05 Speaker 03 You know, I don't know quite how else to reach people, but if I can just tell it with detail and with heart and with dignity, then I feel like people can see their own struggle in it.
38:14 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah, because you're not setting out to, I want to reach Kenny.
38:18 Speaker 03 Yeah.
38:18 Oprah Winfrey? You're setting out to tell a story that's inside your...
38:22 Speaker 03 That's right.
38:22 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
38:22 Speaker 03 That's right.
38:23 Oprah Winfrey? And your goal is to tell that story as fully and as honestly as possible. That's why you're talking to all of those people in the community and doing all that research.
38:31 Speaker 03 That's right.
38:31 Oprah Winfrey? Sitting with them. And if that story is a fully realized and developed story, then people like Kenny will see themselves in the story.
38:40 Speaker 03 That's right. That's right. Yeah. And also, it's part of the joy of being a writer. I mean, we set things in very specific places, but human experience is universal and it's wonderful to meet you and wonderful to meet people all around the world who see themselves in my characters and the experience.
38:55 Oprah Winfrey? All right. So you have a question. It's Brianna, right?
38:58 Speaker 08 Hi, yes, it's Brianna.
38:59 Oprah Winfrey? Okay.
38:59 Speaker 08 It's great to read the book and it was super captivating, but the theme throughout it was lacking hope, I would say, and there's a lot of sadness throughout the story. So I was curious, what were you hoping the reader would feel, especially by the end, without giving it away?
39:17 Speaker 03 Can we talk about men a minute for a second? You know, I was raised with men who did really hard jobs and dangerous jobs that could have killed them and at any time, you know, shipbuilders and coal miners and also people that went out into boats and fished very rough seas. And I found often that one of the ways that they coped with that was by not being very expressive. But I've spent a lot of my life as a writer, thinking about the sadness that men must also carry and how they have no outlet for it often. Often, they couldn't say that they were scared, or they felt undervalued, or this was dangerous work, because so many people were reliant on them for it. And so the novel starts really in that place where John is doing this thing that his son
39:59 Speaker 03 does not want his inheritance, but he has to keep doing it because he is there. And so I'm very interested in-
40:06 Oprah Winfrey? Because he wouldn't know what to do without it, anyway. Who is he without it?
40:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, and his life has amounted to something that turns out none of the generations around him want. But in that is a sadness, a particular male sadness that sort of fascinates me. And so I think I'm just trying to excavate that and to give sort of the working class male in this fiction a voice that says, you know, that they also carry these very deep melancholy emotions in that way. I think there is hope, but I think that hope comes slowly. One of the things that was interesting about this book from my others is I had to submit to the rhythms of the island. I had to, you know, things don't happen quickly or explosively. It's a place where time is measured very differently.
40:49 Speaker 03 And so I had to build it very slowly so that the profits of 50 years of keeping secrets are revealed towards the end of the novel. And in that, revealing is the hope that things will heal and get better, I hope.
41:02 Oprah Winfrey? So, does that satisfy you?
41:04 Speaker 08 Yes, I think the ending is gonna surprise a lot of people.
41:07 Oprah Winfrey? Ending is gonna surprise a lot of people, which we're not telling you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's talk about the brothers, Innocent Sorley, who live in the same home, and they literally aren't speaking to each other.
41:20 Speaker 03 Yeah.
41:20 Oprah Winfrey? Yes.
41:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, you know-
41:24 Speaker 03 On the islands and
41:24 Oprah Winfrey? They have brought no contact to a different level.
41:26 Speaker 03 They have brought no contact. For sixteen years, they have lived in a small farmhouse and they have, they are entirely ignoring each other. To the point where if anyone has a conversation with them, they have to ask one brother the question and then turn and ask the same question.
41:40 Oprah Winfrey? How's your father?
41:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, how's your father? How is your father?
41:42 Oprah Winfrey? Uh huh.
41:43 Speaker 03 And really, what sort of that stems from is when you have children in a sort of rural life, there is the agreement that one of the children would have to take care of the parents, take care of the house, would inherit this thing here. But the other children get to do almost anything they want. They can go into education, they can go see the world. And Sorley has broken that agreement with his brother. His brother Innes has dedicated his whole life to looking after his father. And then Sorley went to university, saw the world, and then returned anyway, which, which just breaks a tacit agreement between them. But I wanted to create these men where because someone had really sort of not only stolen from one brother's life, but then ruined the opportunities he might have had, which might have involved love with another character, we won't spoil it.
42:28 Speaker 03 But how do you cope with that? How do you live in a house with someone? So much of the novel is about families being quite claustrophobically bound together through eating and worship and working and then living in this house. And how well could I write these families where they think they know everything about each other, but actually they don't know each other almost at all?
42:49 Oprah Winfrey? Hmm. In the end, writing a book, when you finish, I know as I was just saying with Kenny, you're not writing the story because you want people to, you're trying to reach a certain person. But in the end, do you, as the creator of this, this beautiful story, do you have a feeling about what you want it to do and say in the world?
43:14 Speaker 03 Yes, and in fact, I wrote the ending of the novel many times. I kept pulling the novel back to the halfway point and a character would do something different and then I would get the final thing. But I knew by the end of the book that I was trying to show that it's often the arrogance of youth, if we are the youngest generation in a family, that we think we're the only ones with secrets and hidden lives and, you know, that we're disappointed in how things turned out. And we don't often afford enough empathy to our parents and our grandparents to also wonder, are you living the life you wanted to live? Are you the person you wanted to be? And so by the end of the novel, that was the question I wanted to answer. You know, it's not just centered on us as the children, but it is about the generation that go before us and can we really heal? Can we move on?
43:59 Speaker 03 Can we have a happy life ourselves if our parents and grandparents are not having that for themselves?
44:05 Oprah Winfrey? Got it. After our last break, his book is so compelling. This audience has a few more questions for Douglas. And listeners, I hope you're adding Douglas Stewart's John of John to your reading list. Feel free to share the link to this episode with your own book club or fellow book lovers in your life.
44:22 Speaker 09 This episode is brought to you by HBO Max. For your awards consideration, HBO Max presents Rooster. Starring Steve Carell, this new comedy series focuses on the complicated relationship between a successful author and his daughter. Don't miss the series IGN called Hilarious and Brilliant. Rooster is streaming on HBO Max. Watch now.
44:44 Oprah Winfrey? Welcome back to the conclusion of my conversation with celebrated author Douglas Stewart. His latest must read novel, John of John, is available now and is my 123rd Oprah's Book Club selection. Yes, sir.
44:57 Speaker 10 I came of age and came out of the closet right about the same time as this story takes place. And what really struck me was not just the sense of carrying your secret. But this strong sense of needing to worry about what everyone else thinks about you.
45:16 Speaker 03 Yeah.
45:16 Speaker 10 I was forced by my father to cut my hair around this time. And I remember asking him almost the same thing Kyle asked Sean in the book. Why does it matter so much what other people think? And my father was just incredulous at the question. Like, of course, you know, you should carry yourself through your life thinking about what everyone else is going to think about you. And even after I came out, he had said to me, I don't think I can live knowing that other people know that I have a gay son. It was so much about, you know, what people would think of him in relation to me. And I just wondered if this was something you found when you were, you know, on the islands.
45:59 Speaker 10 I know there's a lot of, when you're in small towns, everyone's gossiping about everyone else. And so you're more worried about that. But I was just curious about your experience with that.
46:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think it comes back to the "of" of the title again for me. And masculinity in a slightly broader sense. I think a lot about how fathers often want their sons to be made in their images. And in terms of the novel, you know, that's a very dangerous thing when the father hates his own image. And how sort of, you know, that's where the problem really stems from. But fathers often want that for their sons because they understand how the patriarchy works and how narrow masculinity often has to be expressed in the world. And so while they're doing that to their sons, they're also upholding something they should probably dismantle in that way. If that makes sense, but.
46:46 Oprah Winfrey? Oh, I hadn't even thought of it that way before.
46:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, it's a sort of self fulfilling trap in a way, you know? When your father says, you have to be tough and strong and short hair and brave and all this. And not allowing you to be whatever it is you might naturally be.
46:59 Oprah Winfrey? So John is looking at the image of himself and not liking and hating that image and therefore hating himself.
47:05 Speaker 03 Doesn't want it for Kyle.
47:06 Oprah Winfrey? Doesn't want it for Kyle.
47:07 Speaker 03 And he sees it. I mean, I think fathers and sons, even if they try to ignore each other, they see, parents see what is happening inside their children on some level. And I think that's why he doesn't want to sort of talk about it.
47:18 Oprah Winfrey? Bill said he knew Timothy was gay a year before he came out.
47:20 Speaker 03 That's right, yeah. But, you know, I'm sure it's your experience, but one of the things about growing up gay is you become an, you're an absolute fiction to everybody around you until you can claim yourself. You spend all of your. Your formative years, not being yourself, but actually looking at how someone else looks at you always, and then trying to hide the part of you that you know might bring you shame or judgment.
47:43 Oprah Winfrey? That's so interesting.
47:45 Speaker 03 And so you are-
47:47 Oprah Winfrey? It's so interesting from a writer's point of view. You're an absolute fiction.
47:49 Speaker 03 You're an absolute fiction. All young queer people of a certain generation and before are an absolute fiction if they don't feel like they can be themselves, even with their parents. And so much of the work that we do as adults is trying to figure out who we actually are and who we should have been the whole time. But it's not just about, I mean, you're too young to have sexual desire at that age. But it's even just about very simple things. I like playing with a skipping rope or a doll or, you know, I like this pop star or that. And you're forever not really inside your own experience. You're always looking at how other people are seeing you and what they can catch you in. And so that's-
48:23 Oprah Winfrey? And building on the fictional story-
48:25 Speaker 03 That's right.
48:25 Oprah Winfrey? Until you can actually come out and be your authentic self.
48:28 Speaker 03 Or go to the mainland to art school and then go-
48:30 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah.
48:31 Speaker 03 Right before your grandmother decides she wants to see you again, yeah.
48:34 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah, yeah. The end of the novel made a lot of people weep. Did it not make you teary? Yeah. The book was just a magnificent reading experience that we thank you for. And I have to say, for all of us who completed it, it's like you dug into what love can do for those living in a hostile and a judgmental world. Did you not think that, Kenny?
48:59 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:59 Oprah Winfrey? Yeah. And I think many people are going to be thanking you for that.
49:03 Speaker 03 Thank you.
49:03 Oprah Winfrey? Thank you, Douglas Stewart.
49:05 Speaker 03 Thank you very much.
49:05 Oprah Winfrey? John of John.
49:08 Oprah Winfrey? My 123rd Oprah's Book Club selection is now available wherever you buy your books. Thank you to this insightful reading audience. Thank you for your thoughtful observations about the book. We appreciate you, and we'll see you next time. Go well, everybody, go well. You can subscribe to the Oprah Podcast on YouTube and follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. I'll see you next week. Thanks, everybody.
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