Stephanie Sy Quia talks to host Elena Lappin about her debut novel, A Private Man, and the personal history that shaped it. The conversation moves between family memory, Catholicism, generational trauma, dementia, and the challenge of writing fiction that feels emotionally precise without becoming extractive.We discuss how she turned a real family lineage into art, why she wrote from the public edges of family history rather than interrogating relatives directly, and how teaching Shakespeare fed back into her novel writing. She also reflects on care work, the aging of the baby boomer generation, and why she writes about the hard-to-categorize parts of life.
(00:00) Family history, generational trauma, and why not to be extractive
(01:15) Introduction to Stephanie Sy Quia and A Private Man
(02:24) Notre Dame fire inspiration and a scene between grandson and grandmother
(06:39) Cathedral restoration, sacred materials, and the idea of stone “singing”
(08:05) Reading from the novel ends and the interview begins
(09:07) Her family background: priest grandfather, theologian grandmother, and exile
(11:27) Writing from public family history instead of interrogating relatives
(13:52) Poetry versus prose and making every word earn its place
(15:21) Margaret and David: community, desire, and different relationships to Catholicism
(18:05) Hope, cynicism, and the failure of Vatican II to deliver change
(20:16) Writing a male character through institutional British masculinity
(22:42) Sex, war, and the high stakes of intimacy in an earlier era
(23:39) Writing her grandmother through memory, truth, and preemptive grief
(25:41) Teaching Antony and Cleopatra and bringing its energy into the novel
(27:05) Food, passion, and why the novel makes the reader feel hungry
(28:25) Aging, caregiving, and the demographic burden on younger generations
(30:54) Why she writes: slippery identities, care, and frankness about decline
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“I was very keen not to be too extractive about how I gathered family information.”
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“Family history both does and does not belong to you.”
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“I wanted to write about the process of caring for someone at the end of their life.”
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