A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia was our most-loved hardback pick of May, so we’re thrilled to bring you an exclusive Q&A with Stephanie on her writing process, the extraordinary real-life story behind the novel, and just how much research went into bringing it to life. Grab a cuppa, this one’s a good one!
Hi Stephanie! Thanks so much for taking the time to chat to us here at Well Read Women. A Private Man is your debut novel, but you’ve previously published poetry and won awards for your writing. How did writing a novel compare to writing poetry? And have any rituals, habits, or pieces of advice shaped your creative process over the years?
Writing a novel was overwhelming, as it’s just so many more words! Getting to 30k was a real struggle, but then getting to 70k was much easier. I wrote it out of order: when a scene came to me that I could picture, I wrote that. Then I shuffled them all around until they made sense. I was stuck for a long time and made a page of notes every day, even if they were just nonsense, to keep my mind ticking over. I watched my favourite films religiously and analysed how they did it: what quality of light was there in this scene, and what did that evoke? What is the fiction equivalent of a close-up? What did I want to have happen by the 20-minute mark? In this way I un-stuck myself and was able to continue with writing.
Onto A Private Man. We are fascinated by the origins of this story! You’ve spoken about discovering in your teens that your grandfather had once been a Catholic priest which inspired the novel. How did you decide to take that revelation and explore it through fiction? And how did your family react when you told them you wanted to write a novel inspired by that part of your family history?
I found it intriguing, but was also very wary of how much pain my mother still carried about it - pain which was wrapped up in her grief for my grandfather’s death. He had died very quickly of cancer in his late 70s, and I think she felt she never got the chance to say goodbye properly. Her parents had been keen to stress to her that their decision to leave the church had been a political one, but her older cousins (who had been teenagers at the time and therefore remembered) maintained that it had been a torrid love affair. It was only much later in my mother’s life that she was able to reconcile the two, and I suppose I found that an interesting challenge: can you write a love story with this exciting political backdrop, and have both sides of the story be gripping?
There’s so much detail in the novel about Catholicism and priesthood. What was your research process like while writing the book? How long did it take from your initial idea to your final draft?
It took me five years, all in. I started doing loads of research into Catholicism and Catholic history, but then very quickly I got overwhelmed by everything I didn’t know, so I gave up. That’s the reason we have the character of Adrian: he acts as a guide for a modern reader who might not know anything about these issues, because he doesn’t either. One of the challenges of writing about these things was that there is a big divide between people who grew up Catholic and know about the events of the Second Vatican Council in a general knowledge sort of way, and those who don’t know anything about them at all. I knew I had to find a way of writing for both readerships without either feeling patronised. I read Xavier Rynne’s excellent series of Letters from the Vatican, written for the New Yorker, during Vatican II. These were clear and broke down the issues being debated in a way I was able to understand.
But I also came to the research through visual art: I studied History of Art A-Level, so I was familiar with Catholic iconography in that manner, and I had attended a Church of England school, so I was very aware of the King James Bible and the psalms as a literary influence.
The novel has two timelines - David and Margaret’s relationship beginning in the 1950s and the second set in the present day, where we follow Adrian as an adult uncovering his family’s hidden history while caring for his grandmother, Margaret. Did you write the timelines separately at first, or were you moving back and forth between them as you drafted?
I was moving back and forth! Writing a novel is, I have found, the creation of such a delicate cat’s cradle: it must hold itself with just enough tension to work. Failing that, and to mix my metaphors terribly, it’s like getting a newborn foal to stand up and run for the first time: a flimsy miracle. Without the modern day timeline, I think the story of Margaret and David in the 60s would have fallen flat, and I think that for a lot of people who haven’t grown up religious, or who did but are lapsed, it wouldn’t have been able to call across the canyon of years since. To move back and forth between the two during the writing process was very energising for me.
What was the most challenging part of writing David and Margaret’s relationship?
Writing about their poor sexual match: their relationship, when they do finally get together, isn’t a deus ex machina that descends from the heavens to solve all their problems and tie everything up in a pretty little happily ever after bow. I knew from the very beginning that this note of sadness was essential to what I was trying to achieve with this novel, but still, when it came to it, it was very sad and painful for me to have to do that to them.
Margaret is such an incredible character! She’s so intelligent, outspoken, full of conviction and a true advocate for women both in and out of the church. What did you find most rewarding about writing her character?
Precisely that! And those things are all true to the real person of my actual grandmother. She was very ahead of her time in those ways, and it was important to me to acknowledge and celebrate those aspects of her. At the time, when I was writing the book, the narrative around a lot of people in her generation was that they were selling the young down the river with their Brexit voting habits and general Conservatism. There’s a lot of truth in that, but it’s not the only story there.
Also, I love that she is this incredibly erudite person, whilst also being so glamorous, and not ashamed of either: she loves ancient Greek etymology, but also making her own vibrant 1960s clothes.
What do you hope readers take away from A Private Man?
That romantic love is not enough: you must also have the love of your family (however that may be defined), your community, you must find work that you love. That we must live according to our principles and be brave about this.
Are there any female writers who’ve influenced the way you write, both as a poet and now as a novelist?
So many! Joan Didion, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, Penelope Lively, Barbara Kingsolver, Francoise Sagan - to name a few.
If someone is getting back into reading, what’s one book you’d recommend them to read and why?
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver: it’s a multi-perspective novel where each different voice is so masterfully managed, and Kingsolver is the queen of texture in her prose.
Lastly, are you working on anything new you can share with us?
My next project (I think) will be about enraged women in Greek tragedies. That’s all I can say for now!