Juano Diaz’s elegant and heartbreaking memoir immediately brings to mind Douglas Stuart’s Booker-winning Shuggie Bain, which told a fictional tale of similar territory – Glasgow tenements and moments of sublimity balanced against the brutality of a breadline existence. Slum Boy manages descriptions of grinding poverty also alongside images of extraordinary beauty and is a book in which the reader feels that a large part of the redemptive arc lies in the author’s artistic skill in describing his past with clarity and grace; escaping from misery and then revisiting it, presenting even the most painful and sordid incidents in ways that elevate and enlarge them.
Like Stuart, Diaz has written his first book in middle age. Stuart was a successful fashion designer before he turned his hand to literature; Diaz is a celebrated visual artist and photographer, and has collaborated with Gilbert and George and Grace Jones. Like Stuart (and the protagonist of Shuggie Bain), Diaz is a gay man whose work both commemorates and transcends the experience of growing up in a world that sought to reject him at every step.
The book begins with the four-year-old John (the name his mother used for him) recently returned to her from a spell with foster carers (he never knew his South African father). His mother was “too sick from drinking beer to look after” him. John is aware from the start that he is different from his sisters (who are scattered across various children’s homes): “My hair is jet black, not red like Mummy’s and not blond like Ronnie’s, and my skin is olive, not red like Mummy’s or white like Ronnie’s. My name is John, but Granny has always referred to me as ‘the wee bastard’.”
After his mother disappears on another drinking jag, John is adopted by a well-to-do Traveller family, moved out of Glasgow and into the countryside. His adoptive family are rich, but the villages of 1980s rural Scotland are poor and in the grip of a heroin epidemic. John learns Scottish Cant, the Roma language his family use. His “daddy” is a successful scrap metal merchant, runs the local boxing gym, offers the young John a hard but heartfelt love.
The book then leaps forward to John as an adolescent. He is living a number of double lives. While he skips the lessons he doesn’t like, his artistic talent is recognised and encouraged by a sympathetic teacher called Norma. And, at night, he slips out of the house dressed as a woman. He walks around the village in the small hours, imagining himself as his long-lost birth mother, finding an extraordinary release in the transgression. While his parents don’t catch him, they are worried at his increasing air of femininity. He is sent to work in his father’s scrap yard.
From this point, escape is all John dreams about, and Glasgow School of Art offers just such an escape. Life is strung between grease-stained overalls and homophobic banter at work, the complexity of his relationship with his parents at home, and the shimmering excitement of art school and gay bars in the city. Then tragedy strikes, and having escaped the squalor and misery of the slums, John is sucked right back in.
Slum Boy reads like a novel. There are passages of real beauty. Seeing a homeless man drunk in the park, John notes that “his hair flap flops in the wind like a tattered flag... His arms are like brushes, creating a frenzied masterpiece in the air.” Time is handled with great deftness: as John moves from setback to setback, the authorial perspective not only ages with him, but the older Juano begins to interpose, offering his own retrospective commentary on the tribulations of his younger life. This is a book about the way that early trauma endures and repeats itself, finding new ways of shaping itself to each fresh iteration of life. “I just can’t seem to find my footing in the world,” John says as a young adult, and we remember him as a small child, his feet mangled by care home shoes. If Douglas Stuart is the obvious comparison, I’d add two more: Alexander Masters’s Stuart: A Life Backwards and Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child. They are the only other works of nonfiction that have moved me as much.
• Slum Boy: A Portrait by Juano Diaz is published by Brazen (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
