When do you stop wishing people ‘Happy New Year’? There’s a point at which it becomes mildly embarrassing. I’m not there yet. But I’m getting there.

I’m still letting go of 2024 - turning Maggie & Me into a play, turning a corner in therapy, finding new ways to tell stories and new people to tell them with. But 2025 is here and the diary is filling up.

This year my new novel comes out. The Two Roberts will be published in September but it’s starting to find its way out into the world now - to first readers, to critics, to all the people every writer wants to love their book, whatever they’ve written. I’m really excited for people to meet Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, the wild and wildly talented men I’ve been in a throuple with these past few years. They’ve been dead since the 1960s but our love is *real*.

I want them and their art to be rediscovered and celebrated - they deserve to be as famous as the people who danced at their legendary studio parties, as all the Bacons and Freuds. But they’re not and now is not the time go into All The Reasons Why. But let’s just say, it’s no accident Colquhoun and MacBryde are as gay and Scottish and working-class as me.

So, yes, I want you all to fall in love with the Two Roberts. And I suppose that means letting them go - something I’m not great at. I’ve had them all to myself for so long—a feeling I recognise from Maggie & Me and from You Will Be Safe Here. I felt hugely protective of Willem, the central character in You Will Be Safe Here: a young queer boy sent by his fictional parents to a camp that ‘makes men out of boys’. Yet I also put Willem through what his character endures there. Perhaps my protectiveness came from guilt? With Maggie & Me, my memoir, I was much more worried about what people might think of my close family members and beloved friends than of me. I’m sure this was the usual hyper-responsibility of the trauma survivor alongside the anxieties every writer has about sharing their work with a busy and potentially indifferent world. The same feelings I have now and will have with every book, I’m sure.

I’m on the copy-editing stage with The Two Roberts - I’ll share more about that here soon. I want to let you in on as much of the process as people in the hope that making publication more transparent also makes it more accessible which means more and richer stories for all. This edit is another stag of letting go - giving up the chance to make big changes, accepting the book I’ve written and letting go of whatever I’d imagined. Which means letting go of my characters. It feels like I’ve got these two amazing friends next door and they’ve just told me they’re moving to another city, maybe another country. We won’t be seeing each other every day anymore. We’re all sad about it but excited for new frontiers too.

I’m so grateful to Alex Preston for choosing the Two Roberts as one of the books he’s most excited about in 2025. He said (no spoilers): ‘Damian Barr’s second novel. The Two Roberts (Canongate) begins on an Ayrshire hillside in 1934. Here we find the eponymous Roberts – Colquhoun and MacBryde – at the beginning of their lives as lovers and artists. Barr has rescued these two near-forgotten figures in a novel that brims over with generosity and warmth.’

Honestly, I couldn’t ask for more. It means so much to me that a critic has divined my intent - it makes me sad that these amazing talented and, yes, difficult, men have been almost forgotten. I hope my book lifts them back up from the footnotes to the centre of their story, where they very much were and very much deserve to be.

You can read the full list of fantastic books chosen by Alex Preston here. I’m thrilled that The Two Roberts was also picked by the Guardian, Herald (I’m not a footballer or a hardman) and the BBC.

So, Happy New Year. That’s the last time I’m going to say it. I’m letting go now. Promise.

 

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