YouSaid · the spoken record

Douglas Stuart

lines on the record: 46
first: 2026-05-05
most recent: 2026-05-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That's right. Or go to the mainland to art school and then go right before your grandmother decides she wants to see you again.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In 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. 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...”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Came out. That's right. Yeah. But, you know, I'm sure it's a shoot 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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he sees it. I mean, I think fathers and sons, even if they try to ignore each other, they say parents see what is happening inside their children on some level. And I think that's why he doesn't want to sort of Timothy.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone Yeah, I think it comes back to the awe 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 that they should probably dismantle in that way if that makes sense.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 generations that go before us. And can we really heal? Can we move on? Can we have a happy life ourselves if our parents and grandparents are not having that for themselves?”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How's your father? How is your father? 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 sorely has broken that agreement with his brother. His brother Innes has dedicated his whole life to looking after his father. And then Sorely went to university, saw the world, and then returned anyway, 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, that 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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have brought no contact for 16 years. They have lived in a small farmhouse and 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 them. How's your father?”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know what 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. 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”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 does not want his inheritance, but he has to keep doing it because he is there. And so I'm very interested.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's inside your. That's right. Yeah, that's right 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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 sometimes 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 universal and we often all felt very unloved and unseen and very hidden as children and as young people. And I think it's also certainly for me I'm not sure about yourself but certainly for me as a”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into this big thing. So I felt this catharsis and seeing the other perspective 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. For me, I grew up in a patriarchal society. It turns out we all did. 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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did make me feel seen. First, I just have to say that there's something profoundly healing in 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. You know, I really enjoyed how the characters were portrayed through the relationships and dynamics through different perspectives. 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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the religion is hard. The road to belief there is very, very hard. But the community itself has a lot of joy 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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 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 is a very sort of dominating experience.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 neighbours and how interdependent they were in order to sort of get by and survive. But the faith they believe in their own path to God is quite a hard path. We're born in sin. We are going for damnation and God will save only a few and we can give ourselves to Jesus, but there's not much else we can do to...”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I went to the islands with a lot of misconceptions and preconceived notions. I've always felt 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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 cancelling headphones and my husband just goes about his business around me. All the time But yeah, I meet the characters on the first draft, and then I find it what it is that bothers them.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, 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?”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you tend to think, oh, that's terrible. And, you know, will I ever survive? Really? Yeah, yeah. I'm very hard on myself.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 the crafting or the farming is about subsistence. It's not for profit. It's about maintaining and remaining and living there. So if your child then doesn't want this thing that you've sort of held onto the house and the land all this time, you have to question, did you also want it? 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, it's only 26 people, Oprah. It's very depopulated at this point. And so he feels like he owes not only his existence there to his son and also to his mother-in-law to keep her alive and well, but also to the people around him. You cannot...”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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'll 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, this is how they were made. And so the struggle becomes not only sort of with the community, but it also becomes inside self. It's about how can you both love.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, 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 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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it is about how fathers possess sons and how they often seek to control them. When you're on the island, 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 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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I do. I think in all my novels, no matter what, I throw up 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 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. And the 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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You just began. You just can't. You just cannot. And that's when the book for me became much more interesting. I realized it wasn't really about the sun, but it is also about his father and what we inherit from our parents.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 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, I said very casually, we'll of course, some of them must also be gay. 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 knew just instinctively.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And so she's the same as she ever was.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spoiler alert. You could still do that if it's fun for you, but. But yeah, and so it's a story of a young man who is on the mainland at art school. His name is John Callum Cloud. 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. 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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think my characters experience a lot of loneliness. 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 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. Yeah, because the young people want to.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're describing the book. They did. They do it in their homes or 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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Gallic language. Another one is a very devout form of Calvinism. And the last is Harris Tweedweaving. And as soon as I got there, I just suddenly thought, this is it. This is where the book is set.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I've lived my whole life when as soon as I opened my mouse, someone would say, Oh, I've been to the Isle of Sky or I've been to the Islah 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. I actually only knew one and I had been introduced to another. And everyone was just so warm and so welcoming with me.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 because I was born, you know, my family didn't have much money. I never really got to see all the beautiful wildlife in the highlands and the nature that Scotland has. And I certainly never got to visit her many, many beautiful islands.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now you got to really write. Yeah, and in fact, journalists would say congratulations. And is your next book going to fail? You know, it was sort of always success, like failure was baked into success. You couldn't even enjoy the moment. So I said to my husband, I want to go and explore the outer Hebrides, which this beautiful archipelago off the northwest of Scotland I had never been. And he was like, but you sound like a lot of things.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question. Yeah, I think it's always been inside me. 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 I had wanted to go. Before I published my debut novel in 2019, it takes about 18 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 go. I'm being called to the islands. I have to go and see what it is. And he said,”
2026-05-05 · The Oprah Podcast · Douglas Stuart: “John of John” | Oprah’s Book Club · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT