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.
