Alexander Masters - Stuart: A Life Backwards

Home \ Stuart

Stuart: A Life Backwards

Stuart does not like the manuscript.

Two years’ worth of interviews and literary effort to write a biography of this annoying man who now sits squeezed into my armchair, his ugly mug pushed forward in objection.

‘What’s the matter with it?’

‘It’s bollocks boring.’

Put briefly, his objection is this: I drone on.

‘I don’t mean to be rude. I know you put a lot of work in,’ Stuart offers. He’s after a bestseller ‘like what Tom Clancy writes.’

‘But you are not an assassin trying to frazzle the president with anthrax bombs,’ I point out. You are an ex-homeless, ex-junkie psychopath, I do not add.

Life Backwards’ is break for homeless

1185188306_sleepout_small_200 Cambridge Evening News, September 23, 2006

HOMELESS people are being employed as extras in a TV film of Alexander Masters’ award-winning bestseller Stuart: A Life Backwards.

MY FRIEND PSYCHO, from The Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph

stuart_images_passport_100 Stuart: A Life Backwards was an attempt by Alexander Masters to reveal in murder-mystery style what turned his friend – who didn’t live to see it published – from happy child to violent junkie. Here Masters explains how he adapted it for television, and wonders if success might have saved Stuart. Photograph by Eva Vermandel.

Funny days

Funny Days: Aged 15-21 The first time Stuart became homeless he was high on glue, not heroin.
Aged 15, full of zing. The streets were not exactly cosy, but they were not friendless either – a sort of home from home – they suited his temperament. He wanted to live. His brain wasn’t fogbound by thoughts of death.

Stuart and Gavvy on holiday

Stuart Images Stuart, 3, and Gavvy, 5, on holiday The first decade of Stuart’s life is easy to summarise. He does not remember it.
‘I blew it out.’
‘“Blew it out”? How can you blow your memory out? It’s a faculty, Stuart, something you’re born with, not a candle.’