Alexander Masters on 'Stuart: A Life Backwards,' at 5x15

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Alexander Masters on 'Stuart: A Life Backwards,' at 5x15

18 Oct 2010

Speakers: Alexander Masters

Alexander Masters introduces the motivations behind his Whitbread Award-winning Stuart: A Life Backwards which tells the life story of Stuart Shorter, a ‘chaotic homeless’ man whom he met whilst working part-time for a hostel in Cambridge.

The ‘chaotic homeless,’ Masters explains, have a very low life expectancy (around forty), and their situation is seen as a symptom of a wider personality dysfunction, not simply as the result of unfortunate circumstances. His attempt to determine the roots of Stuart’s situation was drawn-out and complicated, meeting resistance from his subject at various points throughout the writing process. Stuart deemed the first draft - the product of two years’ research and writing - ‘bollocks boring’, and sensed that Masters was somehow trying to justify his erratic lifestyle, drug-taking, and occasionally extremely violent temperament. ‘Stuart didn’t want that,’ the author recalls.

Unable to determine whether he was a good or a bad person, Stuart wanted the book to tell both sides of the story, so A Life Backwards became a vehicle - for both author and subject - for trying to understand ‘what murdered the boy I [Stuart] was.’ Stuart knew he hadn’t been born a sociopath, and charged Masters, as his unlikely biographer, with finding out what had made him who he was.