Loving Alasdair – the memoir of 39 years friendship with Alasdair Gray – the second title under our new imprint, VOICES – OUT NOW

Loving Alasdair

 

Loving Alasdair: the 39 years of my life with Alasdair Gray

  • 256 pages
  • paperback
  • 198 x 130
  • £12.99
  • ISBN 9781904737667
May Hooper’s fascinating memoir about her long and close association with Glasgow writer and artist, Alasdair Gray – wacky, romantic, unrequited, boozy, open, compassionate, loving, a different kind of love story

The Author is a trained nurse and her medical knowledge and caring disposition helped form the bedrock of the relationship. It was a relationship that began in the early 1980s when May Hooper and Alasdair Gray met at a party in the West End of Glasgow and when Alasdair Gray, clearly attracted by May Hooper’s striking good looks, asked if he could draw or paint her. At a following portrait session the two realised that they enjoyed each other’s company, that this was more than just an artist/model relationship and the friendship took off and was to last for 39 years until Alasdair Gray’s death in 2019.

The book tells stories of long walks together, of a visit to the Edinburgh Book Festival, of trips to the cinema, of outings to the Scottish countryside, of Alasdair Gray’s work on murals in Glasgow and in Dunfermline (when he was working with May Hooper’s partner, Robert, as his assistant). Conversations and events taking place in the course of their times together are described, sometimes showing connections with books to be written by Alasdair Gray. What is described is sometimes in the general nature of personal friendships, sometimes out of the ordinary, sometimes bizarre and eccentric, always entertaining and always throwing light on the character of this Scottish artist.

Although when they first met they each lived in different parts of the city of Glasgow, quite distant from each other, they were later to become near-neighbours in the West End of the city. The memoir describes the events which led to Alasdair Gray’s hospitalisation and how May Hooper, of her own volition and acting out of deep-seated love and admiration, became the person who organised his home care when he was confined to a wheelchair. The memoir alludes to Alasdair Gray’s relationships with his own next-of-kin and describes how May Hooper was to take on what was in effect an unofficial power of attorney to ensure that his final years were spent in the way that he himself wanted.

Reviews of Loving Alasdair

This is a deeply engrossing work of art by May Hooper and should be on the shelves of the myriad of people whose lives have been touched by Alasdair Gray, not least my own. What May Hooper achieves in this memoir, with humour and sensitivity, is a reminder that people of genius are usually deeply vulnerable. She brings a complex, flesh-and-blood Alasdair to the page, while never letting the reader lose sight of the stature of his brilliancy. May’s relationship with Alasdair was one of deep empathy. No one is better equipped to share with us this lovable and flawed genius.

Joyce Gunn Cairns, MBE, artist


I found it very interesting and a true and original voice.

Susan Milligan, non-fiction editor


If I was to describe this book as a page-turner you may be led to believe it was some kind of fast moving crime novel or the like … In fact this thoughtfully penned chronicle from May Hooper bears no resemblance. The only crime; it isn’t long enough!!  Perusing this revealing, entertaining and sensitive journey reveals a fascinating insight into time spent with a kindred spirit.

Stevie Thomson (your average Joe Bloggs Glaswegian)


It is the unembarrassed intimacy of this account that impresses the reader most deeply. There is no hiding from the directness of the memoir: how May Hooper and Alasdair Gray met, how their friendship, and what can only be described as their love for each other, developed, over four decades.

Essentially, Alasdair fancied this young woman quite lustily, but he maintained a respectful distance and didn’t impose upon her physical space, only expressed his desires verbally, quite politely, it seems, and in letters (alluded to, but not quoted); May did not fancy him physically at all but Alasdair’s imagination turned her into the cover image of his novel Something Leather (1990) and a fantasy figure, so his lust, which could so easily have been no more than an embarrassment in itself, was turned to good effect. How Alasdair and May got to the point of his portrait of her is itself a bizarre, fetish-drenched, open-eyed, curious and disingenuous story, disarmingly simple in the telling, with a wealth of subtext and clearly undisguised implication for the human imagination – both male and female. What comes through in the end, though, is kindness.

And May Hooper herself comes through, from this book, in her own right, as a loving, caring, verry decent human being, who, knowing about loneliness, suffering and abuse, has a special capacity and sensitivity for caring for others. And Alasdair was and remains a particularly special case.

Anecdotes, descriptions, evocations, are all worthwhile. I didn’t know how much Alasdair enjoyed walking in the country, up by Loch Lomond, and the story of how he loses a shoe in a muddy bog reminded me of Hugh MacDiarmid doing the same thing in Shetland in the 1930s. A Scottish writer’s hazard, perhaps?

Hooper’s book is lucid, easy to read and compelling, partly because it’s about Alasdair but also because of May Hooper’s character itself. Her account of the social and personal life of the writer takes us through Alasdair’s different households in Glasgow, where he lived and how he worked, his relationships with other people. We see him in the all-male company of his drinking companions. We meet his first wife Inge, his son Andrew, his second wife Morag, and experience May’s own frustrations and best intentions as Alasdair’s close neighbour and friend.

She takes us through the terrible episode of his fall from the front steps of his flat onto its concrete paving slabs in the basement area below, breaking his back. May’s account of the whole episode bravely subtracts sensationalism but stays fuelled by emotional purpose and consistent engagement. Any writer could learn from her prose style.

She takes us from first acquaintance through to Alasdair’s death with a consistent and unwavering sense of presence. The word ‘loving’ in the book’s title is precisely apt.

But the book is also more than an account of the relationship, more than a portrait of a major writer, more than a memoir of the remarkable woman who is its author: it is also a major part of the great jigsaw of Scottish social literary history, social life in Glasgow and in Scotland more generally.

Scottish literary history has been remarkably lacking in accounts such as this. Very few full-scale biographies have taken us so intimately into the social, urban, civic, personal and cultural worlds of modern Scotland and for that reason alone, this would be a commendable book. That it does so while convincing us that Gray was worth all the trouble May went to is to her credit and also that of the book’s remarkable publisher, Lexus Books, in their ‘VOICES’ series.

Professor Alan Riach, University of Glasgow

The first memoir in the VOICES imprint is To This Northern Shore.

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