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    Stuart: A Life Backwards
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    Stuart: A Life Backwards
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    Stuart: A Life Backwards
    Audiobook9 hours

    Stuart: A Life Backwards

    Written by Alexander Masters

    Narrated by Jot Davies

    4/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    A unique biography of a homeless man and a complete portrait of the hidden underclass.

    ‘So here it is, my attempt at the story of Stuart Shorter, thief, hostage taker, psycho and sociopath street raconteur, my spy on how the British chaotic underclass spend their troubled days at the beginning of this century: a man with an important life. I wish I could have presented it to Stuart before he stepped in front of the 11.15 train from London to Kings Lynn.’

    Stuart Shorter’s brief life was one of turmoil and chaos. In this remarkable book, a masterful act of biographical restoration, Alexander Masters retraces Stuart’s troubled journey. Stuart was homeless, with many of the problems this sub-section of English society display; alcoholism, drug-addiction, crime, violence. Scattered with glimpses of the author’s friendship with Stuart in the years before his death, Masters gives us Stuart’s life in reverse, tracing his route backwards through the post-office heists and attempts at suicide and the spells inside many of this country’s prisons, on back to a troubled time at school and learning difficulties and a violent childhood that acted like a springboard into the trouble that was to follow him all his life.

    This extraordinary book is a glimpse at the underbelly of English society, a world largely hidden from our lives. Funny, despairing, uplifting, brilliantly-written, it is one of the most original biographies of recent years.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateSep 27, 2012
    ISBN9780007493982
    Unavailable
    Stuart: A Life Backwards
    Author

    Alexander Masters

    Alexander Masters is an author and homeless worker. He is the author of Stuart: A Life Backwards and The Genius in My Basement. Stuart: a Life Backwards, was a Sunday Times bestseller and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and Whitbread Book of the Year 2005 in the Biography category. He recently adapted Stuart: a Life Backwards for a BBC film. Alexander Masters lives in London.

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    Reviews for Stuart

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    • 5/5
      Stuart Shorter was a homeless man in Cambridge, England, with a chaotic life of abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, self-mutilating, suicidal impulses, violence (he’s a ‘maelstrom of fury’), theft, imprisonment and institutionalisation. He had a form of muscular dystrophy, as did his father, and a ‘refusal to be thwarted’. Once he had been a ‘happy little boy’, as his mother described him. From about the age of twelve he changed, became a Jekyll and Hyde character, uncontrollable. What this book does is to show how he changed, why, and the depths of his struggles. Alexander Masters and Stuart met in 1999, on a campaign to free charity workers who had been imprisoned unjustly. They would do presentations together, Masters speaking first about the campaign, then Stuart would tell the audience his life story. As the author describes his friend’s contribution: ‘he folds letters and he exposes his soul’. The author wondered how to write the biography of a person who was not famous; it was Stuart who told him how to do it, and poignantly. ‘â€?What murdered the boy I was?â€?’ he says, suggesting that his story be written as a murder mystery, and written backwards, from adulthood through to his childhood. This works very well, with Stuart’s conversations with the author interspersed throughout. Masters is often critical of Stuart, and asks him, repeatedly, to explain his ruinous behaviour. Stuart attempts answers, but also asks the author to ‘give it a rest’ sometimes when the subject is too sensitive. We come to respect Stuart for his gigantic efforts to understand his wounded self, and come to understand that some questions can’t be answered easily, or at all: ‘Stop asking me why, Alexander. I don’t know why. I was so off-key, half the time me mind had a head of its own.’ And Stuart often chastises the author for being too simplistic, not treating each person and each incident on an individual basis, and for not listening. ‘Homelessness- it’s not about not having a home’ says Stuart in one of the epigraphs, ‘It’s about something being seriously f...... wrong.’  There are whimsical drawings by Masters throughout the book, as well as some photographs, newspaper reports and scraps from Stuart’s diary. One of the drawings shows Stuart barricaded into his bedsit, every piece of furniture and every object he owns pushed against the door to stop the police getting in. His figure is desperate, hands in the air above his head, face distraught. Stuart against the world. Masters found a partial tape recording from him amongst the mess, and the transcript is reproduced: Stuart’s voice tells his friend of his anger and despair and how he wishes he could escape from it. Masters and Stuart are very funny, forthright, profane, and confronting. The author often shocks himself (and the reader) out of his judgemental attitude. For a first book, this is impressive: it’s original, about a tortured man with important things to say, and told with humanity and tough affection.published in The Courier Mail, April 29-30 2006
    • 3/5
      An interesting read, but sad and frustrating at the same time. Such a waste of a life.
    • 4/5
      This book was full of surprises: from the funny to the heartbreaking to the sublime. Also equal parts frustrating and rewarding, I never quit wanting to learn more about Stuart.
    • 4/5
      As Alexander Masters says at the beginning of this book, there are many different types of homeless people:'There are those who where doing all right beforehand, but have suffered a temporary setback because their wife has run off with another man (or surprisingly often, another woman). Their business may have collapsed. Their daughter has been killed in a car crash or both....Then there are the ones who suffer from chronic poverty brought on by illiteracy or social ineptness or what are politely called 'learning disabilities'. Perhaps they are dyslexic, autistic, shy to the point of inanity, never went to school ....The youngsters who have fallen out with their parents, or have come out of care and don't know what to do next or even make their own breakfast, they're a third homeless category ....Ex-convicts and ex-army - take away the format of their lives and all they can do is crumple downwards ....Right at the bottom of this abnormal heap are the people such as Stuart, the 'chaotic' homeless. The chaotic ('Kai-yo-ic'), as Stuart calls them, are beyond repair.'Alexander Masters first discovers Stuart begging in a doorway around the corner from Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge. From these inauspicious beginnings, when Stuart announced 'As soon as I get the opportunity I'm going to top meself', Alexander and Stuart develop a somewhat unlikely friendship. Alexander is working for a homeless charity and when the directors of the charity are convicted and imprisoned for allowing drugs to be supplied on the charity's premises, both men are key members of the action group that is trying to get the conviction overturned. The development of Alexander's friendship, and frequent utter frustration, with Stuart forms the foreground of the book. Alongside this Alexander looks backwards over Stuart's adult life and childhood to try and discover what went wrong with his life. And a lot has gone wrong with Stuart's life, from glue-sniffing, to drug addiction and alcoholism, from minor crime to car theft, robbery, violence and possible charges of attempted murder. There are reasons why Stuart is known as 'Knife Man Dan' and 'that mad bastard on Level D' to the other homeless of Cambridge city centre. And yet Stuart is also seen as a success story by the social workers and homeless charities that deal with him, and is extraordinarily convincing in his work for the action group.This is a fascinating, if not very cheerful book, that throws light on a lot of the issues faced by homeless people. Stuart never lived to see the book published, stepping in front of the 11.15 London to King's Lynn train. Recommended.
    • 3/5
      This is the biography of a very disturbed homeless man the author met when they both got involved in a campaign to free two jailed charity workers. It sucked me right in, & taught me a lot about a section of society I knew nothing about. Not in a way that made me sympathetic, but it gave me a new level of understanding. I enjoyed the writing style a lot - the author got to know Stuart on a personal level more than a subject-author basis & so a lot of the reflections are so real, like the comments you may make about your own friends when they annoy you or show a sensitive side. As a result you as a reader don't just view Stuart as a subject or character, but as utterly real. His life is a very sad story, but the book doesn't milk that or play on that. It simply works backwards through time trying to find the one thing that turned Stuart into the mess he was as a grown man & finds a tangled ball of threads all equally weighted in making him who he was.
    • 5/5
      There is not alot I can say about this book that has not already been said by other people on this site except to say that it is the only book that I have ever finished with tears streaming down my face! At the beginning of the book i really disliked Stuart but as I got further through the book I was drawn to his character and what had happened in his life to make him the way he was. I would reccomend this book to anyone who has ever looked down on a homeless person - you don't known what caused them to be in that situation.
    • 4/5
      One of those books that I would call "important" if it didn't sound so trite. Stuart's story is not only engaging, it makes you think. Masters' perspective on homelessness is refreshingly balanced and utterly honest. The ending of the story was flawless - I could read it over and over again.
    • 4/5
      Finished this brilliant book today. It is the story of a man who probably shares a lot in common with other homeless men but who has a unique voice and ability to share and contemplate his experiences. The narrative is quite disjointed, switching from the present (the story of the author's relationship with Stuart as they work together on behalf of two shelter workers who have been unjustly imprisoned) to the past and back again, with the chapters on Stuart's past working chronologically backward to his childhood. It was difficult for me to follow at first but I soon found the rhythm of it and came to see it as another way to illustrate just how unstructured and disjointed Stuart's life was.Stuart is a delightful yet concurrently alarming character, swinging from personable and witty to out-of-his-mind violent. His story illustrates the near futility of trying to solve the problem of crime and the homeless. According to the author, Stuart is part of the "chaotic homeless...[who] are beyond repair...What unites the chaotic is the confusion of their days. Cause and effect are not connected in the usual way. Beyond their own governance, let alone within grasp of ours, they are constantly on the brink of raring up or breaking down. Charity staff fuss especially hard over these people because they are the worst face of homeless and, when not the most hateful, the most pitiable extremity of street life."When asked how long he lived in a particular place, Stuart replies, "To be honest, that sort of question don't mean nothing to a person like me. That's what you're going to find difficult to understand. You grew up with order so you're going to want order to explain things. Where, me, anything ordered was wrong. It weren't a part of my days. My life is so complicated it's hard for me to actually say what happened in them days let alone in what order." So Stuart lives a chaotic life but has the intellect to recognize why it is difficult to understand.When Masters met Stuart, the homeless man was living in a flat and receiving medical care. He was off drugs and considered a success story by the government workers who had helped him. After spending a couple of years with Stuart, Masters comments in frustration, "If Stuart is a success story, then it is pointless to imagine that we can ever really help these people without breaking the national budget...The chaotic? It isn't a bedsit and employment that they need; it is a new brain."The actual story of Stuart's life could probably belong to any one of a thousand homeless men. He had violence in his genes from his father, he suffered sexual abuse at the hands of those he should have been able to trust, he was teased and bullied until he "discovered" violence, he sought escape in drugs and drink, he raged at the world. In that brief synopsis, he's almost a cliche. But at the hands of Alexander Masters, who became his friend and who genuinely tried to understand Stuart, his life, and the way of life of the homeless, Stuart becomes a tragic and poetic character.The power of Stuart's story is in the telling and in putting a single unique face to the homeless. It is heartbreaking and hopeless but has flashes of great hope and humor. I highly recommend it.
    • 1/5
      I think I just could not get into this book. I don't know if it was because the story was backwards or just the style of writing, but it was just too much work for a book.
    • 3/5
      I'll admit, until I read Stuart: A Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters, I'd never even heard of the book, since then it seems like it's everywhere (honestly, every charity shop we went in to on Saturday had a copy on its shelves). I got it as part of the Stranger Than Fiction series with ten other books (which I'd picked up mainly because of two or three titles which appealled to me in the set).It's told by man who worked with the homeless and came to know a homeless, drug-addict named Stuart Shorter through a campaign to release two homeless shelter workers who had been imprisoned due to the sale of drugs taking place at the shelter they ran (despite their attempts to involve the police). Masters tells Stuart's story backwards, starting with the man as he was at the time that Masters knew him, then works backwards towards his childhood in an attempt to discover what it was that made Stuart into the man he became. It's an approach which Stuart requested himself, wanting the story to be presented as a murder mystery type story.It's really not the sort of book that I would've chosen to pick up myself. As I said, it wasn't one that I'd heard of before and I wasn't sure what I would think of it when I started. As it happened, I found it quite compelling and finished it in just a couple of days. I suppose I probably wouldn't have picked it up because I wouldn't be so sure about the subject matter. A book about a homeles man, his drug problem, his chaotic life, it's not the sort of book I would normally seek out to read.I honestly think that if it hadn't clearly been about a real man, I wouldn't really have believed it. If it had been presented as fiction, I would have probably thought it was unrealistic. That said, it was really interesting, if that's the right word to describe it. It certain made me think about homelessness and the people you see on the streets in a different way. I try to be as accepting as I can of things but it can be really easy to forget that there's a whole history which has led them to that point. This book demonstrates that really well.I was a little dubious at the beginning when I read about how the story was told backwards. I couldn't really see how it was going to work. In actual fact it wasn't told entirely backwards, there were little jumps back to the present. There were a couple of times when I found it a bit confusing but I adjusted quickly.It was fairly easy to guess what happened to Stuart as a child, there were little hints all the way through, but that didn't lessen the tragedy of it all any more. It made me feel like there was another story in there which could have been told. If that was what led to Stuart's issues, what caused those of the person who caused Stuart's. It's just made all the more tragic by what happened to Stuart at the end (and beginning) of the book.I'm not sure whether it's a book that I'm likely to revisit in the future, as I said, it's not really the sort of book that I would normally pick up and read. One thing that did feel a little bit superfluous were the cartoon pictures with little captions underneath. They weren't featured in the book with any sort of regularity and I just didn't really appreciate them.It has been adapted into a TV drama featuring Benedict Cumberbatch which I would quite like to see, I'd be interested to see how they made it work. I don't remember it being on when it first aired, but I suppose it wouldn't necessarily have stood out to me as something I'd normally watch.
    • 4/5
      Marvellous. A biography and also a tale of the friendship between “rageous” Stuart, a homeless, chaotic man, and the author, an advocate for the homeless. Not sentimental or sloppy, “told with humour, horror, and exasperation” says the blurb. That sums it up nicely.
    • 4/5
      Hilarious, depressing, enraging, hopeful, heartbreaking.I may be missing a few descriptives for this book, but you get the general idea.Author Alexander Masters starts the book telling you Stuart is already dead and as I read the laundry list of crimes and ways Stuart had hurt everyone around him, I was was wondering if it was such a big loss. By the end of Stuart's story, I feel that yes, it was a big loss, but the loss occurred years before his death. It's not necessarily a story of redemption, and I have the suspicion that Masters may have softened things a little to make it seem like Stuart was rising above the horrible way he had lived his life, but it doesn't make me any less sorry that Stuart wasn't around a little longer to see if he would have managed to turn it all around.In all, it's a gut-punch to read, but it's worth it.
    • 3/5
      What a sad, horrifying, violent life Stuart Shorter lived. Alexander Masters does an amazing job capturing the essence and details of it. The author’s illustrations (simple but witty cute little drawings) add a bit of humor to the ugly story. He also adds a couple of real pictures of Stuart as a boy. Looking at a picture of a cute, normal looking little boy, it is tough to imagine the pain and terror that he went through. The book is also a statement about the ineffectual and often contradictory state of the judicial system. A fast read that packs an emotional wallop.
    • 5/5
      Amazing, heart breaking and hilarious at the same time.
    • 4/5
      Stuart...a challenging story, shared with sensitivity. Alexander Masters admits his difficulties in understanding the life Stuart leads but is determined to discover how Stuart has become who he is - learning about a life backwards. Stuart's story is horrifying, sad and funny all at the same time.
    • 4/5
      What an interesting way to write a biography. Begin at the end and end where it all began. I don't normally read books of this nature but I was drawn in by the reverse concept. It was well constructed, it made me interested in Stuart from the beginning wanting to read to the end to understand what made his life turn out the way it had, made all the more poignant when I read about an incident I had remembered being in the news. Discovering the human story behind a headline made an enlightening read.
    • 4/5
      I rushed out and bought this as soon as I saw the drama on TV (I only wish it had been the other way round). Fantastic book, really funny and really sad at the same time. The way it's written is very clever and perfect for the story. I like the way that the book is as much about Stuart's character as it is about his life. I enjoyed the references to Cambridge too as it's a city I'm very familiar with, and everytime I go there I wonder if I'm walking amoungst his friends.
    • 4/5
      Stuart, the focus of Alexander Masters' book, is as enigmatic and polarizing as real people tend to get. There is a reason that Masters introduces us to Stuart now, rather than beginning at the childhood that spawned this creature.Stuart is akin to a horrific train wreck that you can not tear your eyes away from; he is scary and depressing, repulsive and untantalizing, yet somehow silumtaneously mesmerizing and endearing. You wouldn't want to share an elevator or a dark alley with this character, but you might somehow find yourself compelled to do so anyway. Not only to hear the outlandish tales of the chaos that Stuart has both wrought and endured, but for the occasionally glimpses of the wise and witty soul buried beneath layers of abuse, neglect, and self-loathing.Masters takes the reader backwards through Stuart's life, exposing events as the occurred, then revealing events that laid the groundwork prior to them. Like an archeologist peeling back layer after layer of cultural sediment and fossilized civilizations, Masters removes the grimy layers of Stuart one anecdote at a time. By the time you reach the core of such a being, the young child faced with emotionally crippling systematic abuse, you can feel pity for the man's origins, but you still might not be able to bring yourself to forgive him for what that child has begun. That's probably how Stuart would like it.Forwards or backwards, Stuart's life is an engrossing story worth reading. But reading it backwards, believe it or not, tends to make more sense.
    • 5/5
      Now this is a book that changed my life. Anybody that is remotely interested in funny, tragic biographies that have true literary qualities can read this. It's about a homeless man, Stuart, in Oxford, England. He tells his story to the author and they become great friends. Stuart, to say the least, is a very, very special person.
    • 3/5
      This is the story of a homeless man but told in reverse, starting at his end and working back to his childhood to try to find what went wrong in his life. It isn't strictly told backwards as there are still passages from the present with the writer and Stuart. My main problem with this book is the author who is very much present in the book. I fould his attitude rather patronising, that he thinks it is astonishing that he was found this homeless man with a personality and wants to share his story with the world. The intentions might be good and perhaps he just failed to show it, but there didn't seem to be that much remarkable about Stuart. There were some amusing observations about the British court system, but beyond that it was incredibly bleak.
    • 1/5
      This is a tough book to review for me. While it's nominally in the biography section at my library, and described as a biography, I believe it's better classified as a sociology non-fiction sort of longitudinal case study...of one person (hope there are no social scientists out there having to read that one....). It's a biography, written in reverse chronological order, of a homeless man in Britain. It documents his struggles with crime, finances, police, family, and living on the streets, as well perhaps the most challenging is his mental status and childhood history. The author embeds himself and deeply and impressively becomes part of Stuart's world.[SPOILER INCLUDED, read further at your risk]. I was definitely frustrated that the author makes out Stuart's life outcome as a great mystery, of which we see clues, but no one can quite put together an answer. This is echoed even in some reviews here. Let me give you a clue: how about being repeatedly sodomized as a child! It's pretty clear to this reader that it's not his very mild physical issues (muscular dystrophy-lite evidenced by walking with a limp and running slowly); having no father at home but rather a dedicated step-father; his issues with rage later in life. None of those. Very late in the book, and in a disturbingly overly graphic way, the author reveals that as a child, Stuart's been absolutely brutalized. There's no mystery. The mystery is why the guy has not murdered someone or perpetrated on someone else.All in all, a backhanded, in my opinion immature--even though well-researched--literary example of mistaking the obvious and in the process slightly demeaning the impact of sexual abuse. I think this is part of the reason that it's written backward: the later history is much more interesting as a mystery by keeping the very obvious cause (that perhaps folks won't want to read about in Chapter 2) hidden until the end.
    • 4/5
      Quite an amzing book- although I had serious reservations about the bigoted attitudes of the author nthat seeped through into his language. Very glad I read it though; offered me a chance to think about some things I don't think about much. Worries me that people still need to be told that childhood sexual abuse has drastic consequences.
    • 3/5
      Fascinating look at how people become homeless and why they often stay that way.
    • 4/5
      This book was both funny and chilling, irreverent in its narrator(s)' attitudes towards standard liberal assumptions about addiction, homelessness, and their root causes. The central question throughout this book is "what was the turning point?" for Stuart Shorter to become homeless. It is fascinating and frustrating that there does not seem to be one answer to this question.While Masters has written the book, it does read as a real collaboration, starting with Stuart's assessment of Alexander's original narrative structure as "boring." The story focuses on Stuart, but not at a distance; anecdotes are told through Alexander's observations, but also through Stuart's own voice in long quotations. Masters also includes tellings of his interactions with Stuart (and his frequent feelings of frustration and admiration towards Stuart), bringing the book a strong sense of the immediate, and heightening the story's urgency. This was a book unlike any other that I have ever read as a biography, as a social treatise on addiction, homelessness and crime, as a story of two friends.