Stephanie Sy-Quia

I read the description for Stephanie Sy-Quia’s debut novel A Private Man (out now with Grove Press) and knew I had to get my hands on it. I am constantly drawn to spiritual fiction and stories where characters grapple with and define their own faith, or stories that have an intertextual relationship with the Bible. In other words, I simply could not pass on a historical novel recounting the love story between a priest and progressive female theology student. Though I was taken by the thoughtful prose and sensual imagery, I actually went in blind to the fact that the story of David and Margaret is actually the story of Sy-Quia’s grandparents, also named David and Margaret. 

I sat down with Stephanie Sy-Quia for a (virtual) conversation where we discussed, among several topics, caregiving, writing about real figures, the privilege of privacy, representations of intimacy, and the endless intrigue of the Old and New Testatements. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. 

Viviana Freyer: How exactly did this story unfold itself to you? Was there a moment that came to your life, or was there a certain scene that presented itself?

Stephanie Sy-Quia I spent several stints in my early twenties caring for my grandmother, who forms the basis [for] the character of Margaret, when she was growing old and frail and couldn’t really manage at home anymore. And then we realized later she also had dementia. Dementia’s one of those things where, once you get the diagnosis, a lot of stuff starts to make more sense in retrospect.

Yeah, my grandfather had dementia as well. 

So you know the feeling. It’s one of those things, where…you don’t want it to be the case, so you kind of ignore very tell-tale signs that that’s what it is. 

Caring for her was really hard, but I do think it was the best thing I’ve ever done because it was a very ego-less endeavor. I went to this village in the south of France to look after her, and all my friends were just in the big smoke, getting big jobs that kind of fit the type of education that we had all had. So I felt very out of step with my friends, but I did also think it was very profound to be caring for someone at the end of their life. 

So really, it started from wanting to write about that sort of form of care labour, but then also, when we got the dementia diagnosis, when she was generally frail, I wanted to do justice to the person she had been. She was very unusual for a woman of her generation in many ways. She was very progressive on some topics, and very outspoken. It was right after the Brexit referendum, and she had been deeply committed to the European project her whole life. It really broke her heart, and I think it really sped up her decline because she was just so devastated by the result. The narrative was, “Oh, you know, all the old people voted us down the river. Screw them, let them all die,” but that’s not the only story about the older generation. So I wanted to do justice to that.

And for what it’s worth, I imagine a lot of young people voted for Brexit as well. In 2024 I think it was men [aged] 18-24 who voted for Trump, mostly. So, there’s that. 

Yeah. 

How did you treat fictionalizing your own grandparents, seeing, as you put it yourself, your grandfather was A Private Man? How do you both turn these private into public figures by writing their story down, but also by fictionalizing them?

That’s a really well-framed question. I think one thing that really interests me and one thing that has been really nice to think about in conjunction with the book coming out in the U.S. is that a lot of that progressive legislation of the mid-twentieth century — Roe v. Wade being the big one, and in the U.K. the Sexual Offenses Act, which effectively decriminalizes homosexuality—, both of those legal cases hinge on the right to privacy. We think of them as these landmark cases, as we should, because primarily they are cases of sexual and reproductive self-determination and freedom, but we should also acknowledge them as landmark cases in the history of privacy, and the evolving notion of the right to privacy and the right to a private life.

I think the right to privacy is something that we have very blindly jettisoned in recent years. We are not at all aware of the damage it is doing to us, to have our privacy so invaded and marketed and sold. That’s maybe not the sexiest sell for the book [laughs], but it was very important to me to ask, ‘What does a private life mean?’ In our age of virtue signaling, actually living a quiet life can be a politically radical act. On the face of it, my grandparents did the most conventional thing ever. They got married and they had a child. But also, that was their way of sticking it to the ultimate Man. It was very countercultural. 

To answer your question, it was much easier to crack the character of my grandfather because he’d been dead much longer. I never really knew him as an adult, but he remained a very vivid presence in my grandmother and my mother’s stories of him. I think there was just that much more distance, whereas cracking the character of Margaret was much harder for me and took longer, although ultimately, I think, was more rewarding. Looking after her, while it’s nice to talk about now and I do think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, was also really hard. I resented her for a lot of things. I resented her for the fact that she never anticipated getting as old as she did, so she made no plans. She was a badass, but she was also a pain in the neck. 

She was both a badass and a pain in the ass.

Exactly yeah, much more deftly put. 

She actually died the night we sent my final draft out to editors. It was pretty wild. That was like, a classic her move. So then editing the novel after we had sold it really helped me with my grieving process, because that meant that I got to edit her. And not in a way that means I completely airbrushed her, but it really helped me sift the good from the bad and the happy from the painful. So I think editing as a form of grieving was really helpful for me. 

I imagine the answer is no, given that you said she had dementia, but did she know you were doing this? 

She did, actually! She gave me her blessing, which was cool and special. I was blocked for a long time, because I felt like I was doing something to her by trying to write this story. Because of her dementia it felt as if what I was trying to do was quite violent, writing a story about this person who no longer has the capacity to approve or disprove. But in a moment of lucidity she said to me, ‘What are you working on next?’ And so I told her, but I told her that I was stuck.

She said, ‘Why are you stuck?’

And I told her, ‘Well, I don’t want my version of events to hurt you.’ 

And she said, ‘Well, I don’t think you need to worry about that.’ 

She was already living in a retirement home at that point, and I remember I got on my bike and just zoomed down the hill, made myself a dinner of frozen food, and stayed up late writing. 

How do you think your grandparents would feel about the finished product. David’s been long dead, but do you think this is something he would have encouraged as much as Margaret? 

One thing that I think is such a shame about the hegemonic form of Christianity is that it is all about Christ as the ubermentsch, a sort of superhero Christ, whereas I think there is this incredible latitude within Christianity that has been there for thousands of years of acknowledging the fact that actually, we worship in many ways an intersex god, and a queer god. A man who is both male and female, because he bleeds to give life. 

And has no XY chromosomes, presumably. 

Exactly! And so, I just think that the capacity to have a very queer Christianity has been there for thousands of years, and I think it’s a shame that that’s not one of the more dominant forms that we see today. 

My mum said, ‘Oh my god, your grandfather would be turning in his grave to hear you now.’ I do think he was a lot more traditional than my nana. My nana was proud of my writing. She read my first book while she was still lucid, and she wanted to have deep conversations about it, and that was such a privilege. 

I think they’d be proud of me, but I think they’d be keen to emphasize that it was fiction inspired by their story. This is my first novel, which was a huge challenge, and it was reviewed recently as ‘lightly fictionalized,’ which I think sits more comfortably with me than ‘inspired by.’ 

I think for me writing this novel was a way of trying to acknowledge what I see as an act of immense courage and conscience and principle. I wouldn’t say I’ve started praying [laughs], but sometimes do pop into churches, having not been raised religious at all, and I just kind of say hello to them and say, ‘I hope you recognize the spirit in which I did this, even if it does piss you off.’ 

Speaking of what is and isn’t fiction, or what we might choose or not choose to make real, let’s talk about the Bible. If I can ask, where do you fall on the truth vs. fiction scale of the Bible? Is it history for you? A foundational text? For me, personally, it’s always been a book, which is why I like it so much. 

The main thing to say about the Bible is that it’s a big anthology that had several editors with several different agendas over thousands of years. What appeals to me about the Bible is that it has this incredible textual instability that is very imaginatively rich for writers. The New Testament is just a spinoff series. 

In my first book I got very interested in the Gnostic Gospels, and the idea of a Gospel that has basically been outlawed from the sanctioned version. I find that idea to be incredibly exciting as a writer. The idea that there are these kind of outlawed texts that are speaking to the authorized text, and the authorized text doesn’t really want to hear it. 

So no, the Bible’s not true to me. There are a lot of aspects that I find really compelling, like the language of the King James Bible in particular, and acknowledging the influence it has had on centuries of English literature. I am a literature student above all else. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the Bible is a fairy story either. 

Are there any passages or stories from the Bible that you find narratively or spiritually stimulating?

There’s the Song of Songs. That almost feels like a slightly cliched answer. I love the Psalms as a very, very ancient address to someone who you don’t really know if they’re there, and you don’t always trust that they’re there. 

In the book I wanted Adrian to have a very embodied relationship with his grandmother but then actually a very disembodied relationship with his mother. He has these long phone calls that are frequently interrupted by a lost connection beep. I felt like that was quite a nice parallel for prayer; a long-distance phone call to someone that you just have to trust that they’re listening, and sometimes it turns out that they haven’t been listening because the connection’s been broken. 

A text that was more inspiring to me was Paradise Lost. I think the way that Milton portrays Eve. So much has been said about whether or not Milton was a massive misogynist. He makes Eve clever. Eve is the intellectual equal, if not superior, to Adam. He gives Eve these amazing pieces of rhetoric where she delivers these very clever cutting speeches that kind of use her supposedly subservient position to Adam to her own advantage to undercut him. Adam and Eve have this blazing intellectual match in Paradise Lost which is so sexy.

My next question was actually going to be if there were other texts that grappled with religion that you found inspiring, which you seem to have answered already! I am a big fan of East of Eden personally. 

I have not read that, but I do love The Grapes of Wrath. That has elements of all sorts of things from the Bible, doesn’t it? 

Moby Dick is also a lot about Jonah, as you might imagine. 

One of the most erotic moments of my life [laughs] was reading Book 23 of The Odyssey whilst in line at the DMV to get my driver’s license. 

Classic. [laughs] Happens to the best of us. 

I know it’s a fucking pretentious thing to say [laughs]. 

Penelope says ‘bring my bed out onto the corridor.’ 

But he can’t, because the bed is built into the tree in their bedroom. 

He kind of becomes outraged, and he sort of reveals his own identity by accident. 

You have this kind of shady trickster king all through The Odyssey being all wiley and tricking his way out of any sticky situation, and then he comes home and he finally gets tricked by his own wife. 

So there’s definitely a parallel there with the dynamic between Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. And then the line is ‘Then they just stayed up all night talking.’ I just love that! It’s just such an amazing depiction of mature adult intimacy 

Which I think A Private Man does as well!

Oh, thank you!

Well, actually, the most important text for A Private Man was Anthony Cleopatra, which I was teaching to high schoolers. I think Cleopatra is a very intuitive character for the younger generation to grasp because she’s so sassy and dramatic. Very flawed in many ways. But she’s really clever. Very sexual, but loves it. There’s something quite punk about her. 

It’s also such an incredibly moving depiction of mature intimacy. Anthony says she’s the ‘wrangling queen, whom everything becomes.’ She’s interesting to him. They are well into middle age, according to Shakespeare, and she’s really interesting to him. Then, when he dies in her arms, it’s one of the most beautiful speeches in the English language, I think, because she’s just like, ‘Well, the world’s not interesting anymore…’ I just love that. And the title of my novel comes from Anthony and Cleopatra. He sends a message to Octavius Caesar to beg to be able to live a private man. All the tensions are there, and I had so much fun teaching that play to 16-year olds because they really get it. 

As a teacher, if one day another English teacher did teach your book, what themes and stylistic or substantial discussions would you hope came to the forefront?  

It depends what kind of course was being taught. Are we talking about a historicist English literature course, or are we talking about a creative writing course? I think if we’re talking about the former, then I would want there to be discussion of the religious context, both in terms of religion as a kind of literary influence, but then also the kind of intellectual evolution of the Church. 

As for a creative writing environment…I always fantasize that if I became an academic I would design a unit around the female character, and I would have Milton’s Eve, the Wife of Bath, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, and then Betty Draper from Mad Men and Rachel Green from Friends. I wanted to write about the female gaze. I think the female gaze is oversimplified in a lot of our critical discourse about what it is and what it can be.

I think many people just see the female gaze as a foil to the male gaze. 

Exactly. That’s less interesting to me, but I did want to write about male sexuality. I think that men are under so much pressure to be hypersexual all the time, and to want sex, and to enjoy sex, and actually I think there are far more men that we might at first believe who walk among us for whom sex is not that important. I think David is a character who is just so institutionalized, that he never quite cracks his own sexuality, by which I mean not his sexual orientation, just sort of what he enjoys and what he wants from sex. So I would want the book examined from that angle. 

I quite deliberately wrote the novel to have several overlapping sets of foil. Margaret and David foil each other, then David and Ralph foil each other. 

Margaret and Anna, in a way. 

Yeah, exactly. Margaret and Eileen, et cetera. 

I wasn’t going to talk about myself that much but you might find this interesting, given you also think about men, and sex academically, but my undergraduate thesis topic was Ashkenazi masculinity in contemporary media. 

Oh, cool! Did you watch, presuming you did, Unorthodox? 

I did. 

Did you like that?

I have mixed feelings about it. It’s also based on real life, and you can’t really critique someone’s real life. But I think there’s a bit of a tendency— and this might lead me to my next question actually—, I think there’s a bit of a tendency to make a circus in the media out of religious communities. 

Yeah, I agree. But if we put to one side the fact that it’s based on someone’s real life, I think the way the show kind of handles her faith at the very end. I really liked that. Because actually, one show that has really, really bothered me is Nobody Wants This. 

I haven’t even watched it.

Oh my gosh, no. 

I refuse. 

First of all, it’s based on someone’s real life, so let’s just put that to one side for the moment. Kristen Bell is this archetypal tiny elfin white woman. Like, tiny and blonde, and has this super toned L.A. body. I think about that too; that is the aesthetic of settler sexuality right there, that’s such a fascist aesthetic.

She lives in L.A., for crying out loud, but she doesn’t know what Shabbat is. Where have you been living? And then she meets this man. 

Adam Brody, who’s a rabbi. 

Exactly. The first season ends with him giving up his hip rabbi promotion so that he can be with her, so he’s given up his lifelong dream, his income, his community, his family, et cetera, to be with her. And it’s just like, I’m so sick of this trope of the one from the “immigrant community” having to assimilate to the “host” culture. It just really pissed me off. And the way Jewish women are handled by that show is really disgusting. The second season made up for some of the mistakes of the first.

I just think a lot of these questions of  ‘Oh, but would you give it all up for love?’ are just a result of a hyperindividualized society that can actually be incredibly impoverishing. I wanted my novels to be a love story, but I didn’t want it to have a completely ‘happily ever after’ ending. My grandfather gave up his community, his income, his standing. 

There’s that line of dialogue, I’m paraphrasing, where David says, “You don’t acknowledge that I gave up much more than you did.” 

Exactly. 

Well, safe to say I had no plans to watch Nobody Wants This, and now I definitely won’t. 

[Laughs]

I have one last question, if you don’t mind, which I think ties well with the discussion that we just had. What would you say to people who view religion as, by default, this backward, oppressive thing? Why do you think a religious presence is important in progressive conversations? 

I think people who view religion as very backward and regressive have a lot to go off on. I think that is a fair enough assumption. However, I think it is an intellectually ungracious one, and I think that politically, culturally, what we must practice is intellectual compassion. 

Take the good, and leave the bad, with everything. I think the fact that we have, for a long time now, failed to practice intellectual compassion and to be intellectually gracious has led us to our current moment culturally and politically around the world. 

I think rejecting religion doesn’t make you a smarter person. One thing that religion gives us that few other social contexts give us is just age-diverse social environments. I think if you’re a committed part of a political movement, that can give you age-diverse social environments, but there are still too many people who aren’t really involved in either. 

We live in such an age-stratified culture, and actually we benefit so much from spending time with people both older and younger than ourselves. I spend time with people younger than me because I’m a teacher, but my friends who are in their thirties living a highly urbanized lifestyle, they never come into contact with children or teenagers. The way that that is kind of ossifying their empathy is alarming to me. Cause, we’re meant to be really young! This process of judging the other generations isn’t meant to set it until a bit later. [Laughs] 

I do think religious spaces allow for that intergenerational dialogue, and for compassion. And study! You’re reading a book!

I mean, I don’t necessarily see reading the book as the most important element of it, but then I think that the new atheists who are like, ‘How could you possibly believe?’ It’s like, ‘believing’ the story of Genesis, that was never really the point, you know? I think you’re missing the point if you’re asking how could you really believe this ridiculous fairy story. For a lot of people, it’s more complicated than that. 

I always point back to the fact that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Reverend, and he stayed practicing through his activism, and was maybe, arguably, motivated by his faith. 

Oh yeah, for sure. 

There’s so much about, like, embracing of outcasts. I remember after George Floyd was killed and seeing one of those U.S. churches that kind of have cinema signs outside that said, ‘We worship a man of color murdered by the agents of the state.’ And it was like, yeah! 

Jesus is the original Nice Guy, as well!

[Laughs]

Going back to ideas of masculinity and gender, and our values around those, there’s so much that I find really appealing. It’s just that there is a baddie beast that has been very badly mishandled by a great many lesser men.

And I don’t know if we can say that’s the fault of Jesus himself, or of the Bible itself. 

No, exactly. 

Well, best of luck with the American release! 

Thank you! It’ll be really interesting how A Private Man is received. It’s been really nice because a lot of the Americans I’ve spoken to so far, they seem much better equipped to really drill down into the religious issues of it, whereas in the U.K., there’s so much less literacy of religion. 

I think for better or for worse, Americans are much more religious. 

I actually feel as if I’ve had much more intellectually rewarding, well, maybe I feel like they’re rewarding because I’ve done all this research and I wanted to talk about how much research I’ve done, but yeah, talking to Americans about the book has just been really nice. 

Viviana Freyer writes about literature and film, with a particular interest in depictions of contemporary Jewishness.