With the success of Yorgos Lanthimos’ screen adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things and a new edition of Archie Hinds’ classic The Dear Green Place, the Glasgow novel is having a moment. Among the most recent additions to that canon is Margaret McDonald’s debut novel, Glasgow Boys. SNACK caught up with Margaret to learn more.
Why was Glasgow Boys a story you wanted to tell?
Honestly, I am not sure Glasgow Boys is a story I really set out to tell. I have written quite a few novels (14, actually!) and I never really go in with the desire to say something meaningful with the work or for the work to have a higher purpose. It’s mainly to chase the feeling of being addicted to a story, which is the most enjoyable part of writing for me.
Much of Glasgow Boys was informed by my own experiences, such as working for the NHS, being a working-class student, living in East Kilbride, and dealing with chronic illness and drug dependence, but those elements of the plot came as afterthoughts to the real motivating drive behind writing Glasgow Boys in the first place. Once I had created the boys I felt that I knew them; I wanted to journey with them, and that is my really selfish but honest answer.
The two central characters are Finlay and Banjo, who are beautifully realised. How did you approach writing them?
I actually wrote a few different novels with Banjo and Finlay before Glasgow Boys; one set in America and another in London. As I grew as a writer, and my thoughts became a little more inward about my life, I decided to write them in Glasgow during the pandemic.
It was more of an exercise than anything, not something I was going to consider publishing. But obviously, writing about the pandemic as a disabled person who was highrisk and working as a vaccine assistant, when I put Banjo and Finlay into what became Glasgow Boys, it opened up my world a little bit to the fact I could write about Glasgow, its streets, its people, its culture. When it was done I knew I had found their story.
When you’re a young writer and are used to doing it as an escape, you want to get as far away as possible, to make a new world, but now that I am older I want to explore what I see around me, I want to celebrate the small joys – connection, kindness, family meals, coffee outings, a comforting hand, a hug – because at the time I was writing it, I wasn’t sure when I would have those things again.
The novel deals with the importance and complexities of friendship, which is still quite rare.
I grew up on romance books and movies, and while I certainly adore writing those stories, Banjo and Finlay’s relationship felt too special and important to sideline as a secondary plot.
Every novel I had written before theirs had a romantic main plotline – it was virtually the driving force behind the novel – but when I started thinking about the boys and their story, I realised it was constructed around their dynamic, and everything circled back to it. Even what was happening to them in the present. They’re so chalk and cheese and yet they’re exactly what the other needs.
In some ways they’re bound by the worst moments and parts of their lives, yet if those things had never happened they’d never have met. It’s complicated, but it gives birth to the most important relationship they’ve ever had. I wanted to showcase that, not in the brief period of time they spend together, but in the way it stretches across time and the entirety of their lives.
I think I stumbled upon the fact that I wanted to show how profound and life-changing a friendship can be. How restorative and in some ways romantic, though not physically or sexually romantic: more ‘full of love’. That kind of relationship changes you, and will always be with you.
You studied Creative Writing at Strathclyde University. What did that course give you as a writer?
It gave me so much. Freedom and space to think creatively and push myself was so vital to me as a writer. Studying writing was also so refreshing and innovative, and not something I had experienced before then. But any opportunity to write, in any way, would have always been something I gravitated to, and so it felt natural to pick creative writing to study.
It never felt like work: sometimes it was tough, especially receiving feedback and being graded, but the actual studying was always so exciting, and being challenged to think about creation was so fun.
In saying that, I would never say that to study writing is strictly necessary, especially for those writers without access to further education, because I believe any opportunity to write will further your craft. It’s not so much about the end product as it is the journey. However you get there doesn’t matter, because it all leads to the same thing: writing.
Glasgow Boys is published by Faber & Faber Ltd. Available here.
Main Photo Credit: Heather Callaghan