Douglas Stuart Reads "A Private View"

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2:27This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker. On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Douglas Stewart read his story, A Private View, from the April 20, 2026 issue of the magazine. Stewart has published two novels, Shuggy Bain, which won the Booker Prize in 2020, and Young Mungo, which came out in 2022. A new novel, John of John, will be published in May. Now here's Douglas Stewart.

3:05A Private View None of the men looked up as my mother came down the museum stairs. I felt sorry for her. I wished I could make them notice. When she reached the middle landing, she paused, and I could tell she was resisting the urge to go back up and give them a second chance to get a good look. I smiled as she began to descend the final set. She gave a little kick with each step, so that her long coat parted and revealed a shapely leg. Jean wasn't wearing her glasses, which helped to spare her from disappointment. She couldn't see that the men had ignored her, but I was certain she had felt it.

3:46She couldn't see me from this distance either, but she didn't squint or search about. She simply arrived in the space, knowing I would be there for her. I was always there for her. As she neared the bottom of the stairs, she unbuttoned her coat. She was wearing her favorite dress, the knitted one with herons embroidered on the front, their necks intertwined, and the moonlit sky behind them set with payettes and sequins.

4:13Douglas Stuart:It had the cheap glint of lurex, and although it was loose, it clung to her body in the places she was softest. At the weekend I had taken her to Anne Taylor and then to Eileen Fisher and offered to buy her anything she liked. She came out of the changing room in one outfit after the other and stood before me as though I had talked her into trying on a hessian sack. I wondered aloud if she wouldn't like to look a little more refined for the opening. We persevered for ages, before she said, in a voice so low that I almost missed it, In all these years I have never once tried to change you. My mother crossed the foyer toward me.

4:55Do we have to stay long? she asked. Hello to you too, I said. And no, just long enough to be supportive. Earlier that afternoon, my husband David had phoned in a panic because he had forgotten a folder full of checklists. I promised to bring the folder to him. I told my mother that I would stay uptown and would arrange a car to bring her to the museum later that evening. I walked her through all the details for recognizing the Uber Eid order and assured her that everything would be all right. The art crowd made me uncomfortable. I always needed a bracer before one of David's openings. When I came out of the subway, I went into the first hotel I saw, where I sat at the bar and drank an Isla malt.

5:43I would have liked nothing better than to waste the afternoon in a bar with my mother, but Jean was only fun to drink with until she drank too much. As she stood before me now, I realized how she had spent the afternoon in my absence. She had dyed her hair cough syrup red She had teased it into its usual brittle coif and lacquered it with hairspray that made it sparkle like loft insulation For goodness sake, I was only gone a few hours She patted the back of her head Don't you like it? Jean had recently come to the opinion that her hair colour which had been bottle black since I was a boy had been prematurely ageing her Now, in her sixties, she had stopped dying it and for a while had seemed to embrace its natural pigeon tones.

6:37When she arrived in New York, I hardly recognised her because she looked surprisingly appropriate for her age. I told her that the silver brightened her grey-green eyes, but every morning while she had been staying with us, she had worried that her smoking was staining the front. She didn't trust her bathroom mirror, so I took her to the window. I held her chin and turned her in the daylight to see if there was a trace of nicotine in her curls. I liked to be this close to her, so I took longer than I needed to reassure her that, no, her hair was fine, and that, yes, she was, despite the years, still beautiful.

7:17Douglas Stuart:I held her hands. The tips of her fingers were stained with red dye. She grinned as if she were my child, and I had caught her playing with ink markers. I would have paid for a proper salon. I was feeling drab. I couldn't wait. Pulling her hands from mine, she looked toward the exhibition. Please, Mum, just try and behave yourself. She scratched her top lip with her bottom teeth. With a little nod of her head, she indicated that I should look down. I saw that inside her coat pocket lay a quarter bottle of Smirnoff. Just in case, she said, and then, with two fingers held aloft, she grinned and gave me the scout's salute.

8:01Douglas Stuart:Best to be prepared. Dib, dib, dib. We walked toward the first gallery, and I could tell by the scrape of her left shoe that she was still favouring her right hip. And how did the taxi know where to bring me? I told you, I'd do it all from my phone. I loved introducing my mother to new technologies. I could spend hours explaining how dating sites and chat GPT worked. When I was a girl, we listened to records, she would say. And when I was done having my own children, we still listened to records. The unveiling of the new wing had been timed to coincide with a mid-career retrospective of an Italian sculptor.

8:43Douglas Stuart:The artist created devotional scenes representing the 14 stations of the cross. For each station, he arranged different figures around the room. Viewers could walk through the scenes and feel as if they were witness to the passion of the Christ. It was a sprawling work that had taken the sculptor the better part of two decades to complete. As David and I had lain in bed that morning, I had read the reviews to him. The critics said the show was well worth seeing, and David was relieved. They saw a little Coons and a little Hanson, and they said that the artist had clearly borrowed from Rubens with his mass of twisted bodies and the faithful who were crying out to the heavens.

9:24Douglas Stuart:They saw the influence of Tintoretto in the way the minor characters were caught up in their own petty dramas, in the way the baker haggled over bread as Jesus collapsed for the third and final time. From a distance, the scenes seemed like classical interpretations of the stations, but on closer inspection things became a little stranger. Throughout, the artist had substituted some of the biblical figures for characters from popular culture. He swapped Pontius Pilate for a sneering starscream from the Transformers. The weeping women of Jerusalem were interspersed with a half-dozen inconsolable smurfs.

10:04There were other jarring, anachronistic details in the vignettes. Swiss guards showed up in the crowd scenes with their feathered helmets and their square, muscular buttocks. Italian Nonna stirred pots full of sauce with a look of utter boredom and, here and there, Neapolitan Ragazzi sat atop their motorini and gawped at the torture. They held ceramic phones aloft, as if recording the crucifixion for their social media feeds.

10:33Douglas Stuart:The critic for the Times had debated whether it was a triumph of artistic genius or the work of an obsessive shut-in, a grandmother who was mad for porcelain ornaments. If I were being honest, which I could rarely be with David, it felt like a little bit of both. The sculptures showed the strain and the delicacy of their materials. They wore their flaws without apology. The figures had cracked in many places, and some of the statues revealed their complicated armature. All the reviews had featured one particular scene in which Mary Magdalene was replaced by a tight-faced Melania Trump. She was wearing her military jacket with I really don't care, do you?

11:14Douglas Stuart:emblazoned on the back. She had her arms folded and her hands were broken off in what was assumed to be a statement of an indifference towards suffering. To fill the cracks in all the sculptures, the artist had melted vats of beeswax. To the beeswax he'd added his own blood and cups of semen that he had milked from anonymous Italian men he'd met on dating apps. In a type of kintsugi, he had lovingly mended the fault lines with this rose-coloured paste so that all the figures seemed shot through with pale veins. The galleries were suffused with the tang of iron and old cum. Tonight's private viewing was for the curatorial staff and the museum's board of directors, but, more important, it was a chance to dazzle the wealthy donors who had bequeathed the permanent collection that filled the other halls.

12:03Douglas Stuart:I was here purely because my husband was the assistant to the chief curator. I loved the museum, but I disliked the people who attended these events and how quickly they decided that I had nothing to offer them. I felt fat and uncomfortable in my only suit. My trouser button was undone, concealed and secured by my belt. Earlier, as I waited for my mother to arrive, I had wandered through the exhibition alone. I knew a few of David's colleagues, and they seemed similarly shoehorned into their best outfits. The benefactors, on the other hand, wore their wealth with ease. The men were in custom suits, and the women in sleeveless dresses, all the better to show off the tans they had acquired over Christmas.

12:46Douglas Stuart:My mother walked around the first station. I was relieved to see that it held her attention. The rendering was so lifelike that even if the meaning and the metaphor were lost on her, she could appreciate the dedication that had created it. She stopped and frowned at the intergalactic robot standing in for Pontius' pilot. I wondered if she understood the reference to childhood cartoons. My sister Louise had spent hours perfecting the screechy, imperious cry of Starscream, only to use it when phoning the takeaway and ordering curry sauce and chips. I must have been smirking, because my mother turned suddenly with the suspicion that I was laughing at her.

13:24Douglas Stuart:What's so funny? I caught myself, but it was too late. My mother was looking at me expectantly, and I scrambled to erase my sister from the story. You remember the cartoons I liked when I was little, with the robots that turned into cars and jets and things? Well, this guy's the baddie, the second in command. My mother nodded loosely, as if a fly were buzzing around her head. It let me know that she heard me, but that she barely cared. I followed her into the next gallery where a photographer was shooting a large group of people. The man at the centre looked so traumatised that I could only imagine that he was the sculptor.

14:05Douglas Stuart:A chorus of museum staff was gathered around them and my mother stopped to watch them. There were two young women, arty types and thick framed glasses. They were wearing variations on the same rumpled plissé frock and, just before my mother said it, I knew she would ask me if the women owned an iron. The crinkles are deliberate, Mum. They bought them like that. Would it kill them to buy a belt? As the tallest man in most rooms, David was usually easy to spot. I searched the crowd for him. It was strange that he was not with this group. I turned back to my mother, but she had wandered away. I meandered among the statues a while.

14:48Douglas Stuart:A magnificent Raffaella Cara appeared in a celestial vision to a crowd of Roman soldiers while off to the side a gathering of ceramic youths did the dougie for our fallen Christ. Is there much more to see? my mother asked, startling me slightly. Where did you slink off to? She shrugged. See that taxi you sent for me? I thought I could smell vodka on her breath. It wasn't yellow. The man pulled up and rolled down the window and started calling out your name. But I couldn't understand him because he had an accent. Jeannie, you have an accent. And so I had to walk right up to the window like a common prostitute.

15:31Douglas Stuart:My mother could look so small sometimes. I was aware that she did it deliberately. She relaxed her shoulders and let her arms go limp. It was an old trick, but I was powerless to resist. Another half hour and then we'll go for a drink, yeah? I said Yeah, she said with a sudden smile You have yourself a deal As soon as I looked up again, I glimpsed David in the next room He was watching me and frowning We locked eyes and I smiled and gave him two enthusiastic thumbs up I'm so proud of you, I mouthed silently But David only puffed out his cheeks in exasperation I wondered how much he had seen of my mother and me.

16:14Douglas Stuart:He was in a group of employees who were following in slow procession behind an older man who was being pushed through the galleries in a wheelchair. Frederick Bollen had been the chief curator of painting and sculpture for almost three decades. This was to be the Norwegian's last show for the museum before he was forced into retirement at the end of the year. David was the first assistant to the soon-to-be former chief curator while the women he trailed were assistant curators. It was a slight rearrangement of words that annoyed David because it defined roles that were, in fact, very different.

16:50Douglas Stuart:It was the women's job to worry about the art and the artists, to curate shows and concern themselves with provenance. We had discussed the wheelchair many times before. It was David's belief that, as soon as he put his hands on the back of the chair, his career would be over and he would be reduced to some kind of human-powered locomotive. He asked me if that was fair. Didn't he already order the man's lunch and pick up his dry cleaning? Didn't he manage his calendar and decipher every crumpled receipt that Frederick tossed on his desk? It was too much to be expected to move the man from room to room, from desk to bathroom.

17:28Douglas Stuart:He had perfected the art of looking the other way whenever Frederick needed assistance. He simply moved towards the back and waited for a woman to feel the pressure to step forward and push the curator. It rarely failed. When I had asked him why Frederick didn't just buy a motorized wheelchair, David huffed and said it was because Frederick was in denial, and even after fifteen years in the chair, he still believed that he would soon be back on his feet. David looked handsome in his suit. I jabbed my tongue into my cheek, letting him know I would suck him off later. He crossed his eyes quickly.

18:03Douglas Stuart:Then he scanned the room to see if anyone had seen him act the fool. I was smiling as he turned back to the curatorial cortege. He was the tallest of five tall brothers. His father was the fourth generation in a long line of gentleman ranchers, weekend cowboys who'd made their fortune in Austin as attorneys for large oil companies, but whose identity was still tied to the thousands of acres that the family owned near Marfa. His mother was caught between the opinions of her church and the newfound liberalism of the Austin elites. One weekend at the ranch, she said that David had broken her heart, but if you boys, and she used the phrase you boys with a flap of her hands to mean all the little queers in the country, if you boys can get married now, then perhaps you boys should.

18:50Douglas Stuart:To her mind, if David insisted on being gay, then perhaps matrimony would keep her church friends from obsessing about his sex life. Until we were married, whenever I visited the ranch, David slept in the main house while I bunked in a well-appointed cabin that sat at the end of a dirt road. At first David complained that none of his brother's girlfriends had been asked to do the same, but it soon became clear that the casita was preferable to the main house where his mother hovered over everything and darkened the mood if she was not the constant centre of her son's attention. As we sprawled in his grandmother's old oak bed, he made me promise never to write about his family.

19:30Douglas Stuart:I agreed on condition that I could become the lady of the house when his mother died. He rolled on top of me and said that my mind was too precious to spoil in the dusty Texan heat. I had been in Marfa the Thanksgiving that David announced he'd be assisting the chief curator. I had witnessed his father puncture his joy by telling him that no loudened man would ever put his hands to another man's wheelchair. Later that night, we drove to a distant gas station simply to escape the compound. I complained about what his father had said, and David yelled at me. He said that I didn't understand how complicated class issues were in Texas, but that I should, seeing as I was a Scotsman who never ever shut the fuck up about oppression.

20:13Douglas Stuart:He mocked me, and did a hideous impression of a Dickensian urchin. As cruel as his words were, to hear a Texan attempt a Cockney cretin who seemed somehow related to Mrs. Doubtfire, was infuriatingly funny. I laughed bitterly. Then I agreed that class was indeed a tricky subject, but in fact it was quite easy to not be a cunt. He often treated me like a yokel, like a cousin from the old country who didn't understand the workings of a nation as great as America. His family wore blue jeans and sun-beaten hats, and when they were among their labourers, they almost seemed of the people. But I could feel the way they maintained a subtle distance, a faint superiority as defined as any English lords.

20:58Douglas Stuart:They were Scottish Presbyterians from generations back, and so they overlooked it when I used phrases like council house and school dinners, because although I had been poor, at least I was Scottish, pale and pure from the source. David's favourite insult was to tell me I didn't know what I was talking about. He did it so often that I once made a list of all the things that he granted me expertise over. Those were rain, house cleaning, and alcoholism. I'm tired of you looking at my family like that. Like what? Like they're villains. Yeah, I said snidely. I apologize, I do. I was wrong. I see that now.

21:42Douglas Stuart:How dare I think badly of a family that stole everything from Mexicans. He pulled the car over and told me to get out. When I refused, he lifted his boot and kicked me out. He left me there, sitting on an embankment, shivering in the darkness, for an hour or more. There was no phone signal, no passing cars, no house lights for at least thirty miles. Eventually, guilt or shame got the better of him, and he came back to collect me. You can't look down on another person's family, he said. I know that, I said. I'd been humbled by the cold, more afraid of the dark plains than I would admit. No, I mean you.

22:25Douglas Stuart:You, specifically. How dare you look down on someone else's family? A penny for them? Jean asked. I made sure that David was out of my line of sight before I replied. I was thinking about a story I want to write. Oh, not another story about me, she cried. Another book about how I was the world's worst mother. I wish you could find something else to write about. Yeah? Me too, I said. I'm trying, but every time I think I'm writing about something else, I always end up writing about you. Obsessed, she said. That's what you are. It was my childhood. Well, it's not healthy. It's high time you got over it.

23:11Douglas Stuart:What? I scoffed. Just like my sister did. At the mention of our Louise, my mother reared back. She turned and said to the room behind her, Do you hear how he talks to me? How he talks to his only mother? But no one was listening. My sister Louise taught art at a secondary school within one of the city's most deprived housing schemes. She joked that, really, she was a bouncer in a nightclub where the patrons didn't need to be drunk to start a fight. She lived with her husband and their three daughters in an airy flat on the leafy south side of Glasgow. It would have taken Jean two short bus rides to visit her.

23:53Douglas Stuart:But Louise had cut her mother out of her life many years ago. Louise's breaking point had come one Christmas. It was to be the last Christmas before I left Glasgow to live in New York. For several years, her mother had been asking to host us at her small flat, saying that she wanted to make it up to us for spoiling so many of her Christmases when we were growing up. Louise had been able to duck this in the past, but this particular year, Jean had started her pleading early, and I had bullied my sister until she agreed to give her mother one more chance. On Christmas Day I showed up on time and knew instantly that something was wrong.

24:31Douglas Stuart:My sister was scowling and pacing the path outside my mother's flat. Her car was parked nearby, and the engine was running. I peered into the car. My eldest niece looked to be on the verge of tears. She was wearing a velvet dress, and her hair was in ribbons. Her presents were arranged all around her, as if she were the centrepiece in a gift basket. I rapped on the glass and waved hello to my brother-in-law. It had begun to snow. The tip of Louise's nose was bright red, which made her eyes seem ferociously blue. Without asking, I tried to guess what she already knew, that Jean was lying dead or, more likely, dead drunk somewhere, and that Christmas was cancelled again.

25:12Douglas Stuart:We waited half an hour or more, debating whether to call the police out on Christmas Day. Then, while Louise was peering through the letterbox, her mother alighted from the back of a black cab. A young man I'd never seen before got out and paid the driver with a handful of loose change. Jean was all smiles. She had a single rotisserie chicken in one hand and was swinging a plastic bag in the other. The bag was full of winnings from an all-nighter at the Corinthian. The coins were rattling, and the pale pallor of a sleepless night made her seem more like Jacob Marley than like anyone's idea of Santa Claus.

25:50Louise never spoke to her mother again.

25:53Douglas Stuart:When she fell pregnant with her third daughter, she bought herself a journal with a photograph of a baby wrapped in cabbage leaves on the cover. She wrote a manifesto, a promise to her unborn child about the type of mother she would be. When you are feeling sad, I won't tell you that men don't like that in a girl. When you wake up in the middle of the night, I will be at home. After the baby was born, she wrote her mother a 46-page goodbye. I'd moved to New York by then, and Louise's letter, which my mother read down the phone, made it clear I would be the only one of her children to stay in contact with her.