Studying English was middle-class even the word English was jarring and dangerous in the East End of Glasgow. I had wanted to study English and to become a writer, but in the world of my childhood, boys didn’t do such things. While Shuggie Bain is very much a work of fiction, at the heart of it are the memories I carry of my mother’s struggle with drink, with men, with her modest dreams. She would always begin with a slurred dedication to Elizabeth Taylor. At a very young age, on nights when her inebriation signalled something especially sticky or ominous, I would try to distract her from the drink by playing secretary with my pad and pen while she dictated her memoirs. When you grow up with an alcoholic parent, you develop mechanisms – strategies, tricks – not only to survive their illness intact, but to try to save them as well. For such a combustible, sparky soul, it was an unexpectedly subdued exit. One day when I was 16, she died, alone at home, while I was at school. My mother was an alcoholic and drink stains all my memories of her. She was wounded in ways that my love could not fix. My mother was a glamorous, gallus, Catherine-wheel of a woman.
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