Issa Quincy: On Memory as Mutation, the Spaces Between, Learning Through Editing, and His Debut Novel ‘Absence’
Nostalgia is a confusing, beguiling thing. Memories can be triggered by the strangest and slightest of situations—a phrase overheard, the perfume worn by someone walking past you, a scrap of a song. And they can’t always be trusted: we misremember how we felt in a moment, idealising a happy moment or intensifying a sad one. Despite this, memory is a solace: it’s only natural we find ourselves turning to it in times of loss.
In Issa Quincy’s debut novel Absence (Two Dollar Radio, 2025), a nameless narrator finds himself drawn to a myriad of characters: his former schoolteacher, a bus driver he befriends, a grieving woman, a man and his estranged aunt. In each encounter, there is an absence: a story of loss. Memories are recounted to the narrator in a spiral of nested narratives, or encountered via everyday objects: photographs, letters, poetry. And these stories echo in his own life, in small but impactful ways.
Reading Absence, I found myself dizzy, caught by its quiet, careful prose, its thoughtful rumination on memory, and its reminder of the work it takes to live in the present. Absence is a reflection on the precarity of remembering, while reminding us of its absolute necessity. I spoke with Issa Quincy over email about some of the work that went into his debut novel, how he thinks of memory, and feeling at home in confusion.
Nirica Srinivasan: I’d love to hear how this book began for you. What was your starting point, and how did it grow from there?
Issa Quincy: The novel came out of failure. I am coming to see all things do. I was working on something else, and for whatever reason it wasn’t working. I think I overworked it before I’d truly begun it. At the same time, I was drifting between several places: a house in South London, an apartment in West London, a house in Oxford and a house in Norwich. I wasn’t ever in one of these places for more than a few days. I was taking lots of trains. And I think that peripatetic spirit bled into the work. I had been reading Antwerp by Bolano and Marcovaldo by Calvino. The novel-in-parts suddenly seemed an honest path to me. One afternoon, I was at my father’s apartment in West London, sitting at his large wooden table, and I began typing. I didn’t stop for three weeks. I wasn’t sure where I was going, but eventually nine stories with a wandering narrator fell out of me and I had a first draft.
NS: To learn that your first draft came from such a short, intense period of writing is amazing. How long did it take for the novel to get from its first draft to the final version? What was that process like—what kind of editing, or rewriting, did it require?
IQ: Well, in truth, I really don’t enjoy editing. I love to write and then have an urge to move quickly on. I have had to learn to like it more than I do. My wonderful agents Tracy Bohan and Ben Oldfield at Wylie made the editing process so painless for me. I worked on it with them for over a year before we sent it out to publishers. And I learnt so much in that time about the text itself. Editing is how you deepen your understanding of what it was you were trying to say, and it is a process of dilating and contracting, rising and deepening the work. There were more stories in the early drafts, and it was far more fragmented than it is now. In editing it, I cut it down drastically, rewrote large sections of it, and thinned out the focus of it to make it feel more cohesive.
NS: A lot of Absence consists of nested narratives—stories and memories recounted to the narrator by other people, or via journals, letters, objects. Often the narrator faces a facet of himself in other people’s stories. One of my favourite moments is when the narrator encounters a photograph of his godfather; he says it feels like an “essential truth” was revealed in the photo. How did you approach that structure and that idea?
IQ: The deferral of experience is something we all face each day in the world. It is something perhaps exacerbated by the internet, too. Though I am sure someone smarter will have something cleverer to say on that. I suppose I see memory as mutation. It is not a set of static images, sounds, or smells but a series of growths, if you will, that sprout off an originating experience. One need not strain for this metamorphosis, it happens naturally. The nesting of narratives is the layering of memory. Though it is not the layers of memory that interest me but the spaces between. Those silences, gaps, lapses, stops not starts, are to me where a more profound meaning is formed. Perhaps that is where the “essential truth” of the photograph lies, in the palpable silence of the image.
NS: There’s a haunting, almost magical characteristic to Absence, in the characters' search for meaning in the face of grief, but also most notably to me in these synchronicities and coincidences that appear across the text and across the narrator’s life. What does that synchronicity mean to you in Absence?
IQ: I neither believe in coincidence nor predetermination. To me there exists a binding force between us all, but it is elastic. It is not as boundless as “coincidence” would suggest, nor as rigid as “fate.” Instead of synchronicity, I like to think instead of what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” which relates to quantum entanglement. Very simply—two or more things can happen at once in different places no matter the distance. That enmeshment on the particle level I believe must extrapolate outward to our state and beyond. We can become entangled with others, with objects, with places. My grandmother always repeated to me that we live in a whirlpool: things repeat, not of necessity but potentiality. The linkages we feel out in our lives not only establish a sense of logic and order, but also randomness and fluke. Between those two senses is a blurry, unstable feeling that somehow feels clear to me if I allow myself to float freely between them. I suppose I am more at home in confusion.
NS: There’s a constant reminder in your book of the insufficiency of language to capture a feeling, the imperfection of memory, and the way memory, words, and images are very closely related. Clear, straightforward narratives are really never how we remember things. What, if anything, has influenced your thinking of memory in this way? How do you approach writing something that is about something impossible to write about?
Christine Lai mentioned Chris Marker in relation to your book, and I watched La Jetée for the first time last week as a result, which made a really lovely companion piece to your novel!
IQ: When I was eighteen years old, fresh out of school, I somehow got a job as the editorial assistant to a psychoanalyst in Cambridge. I blagged my way in. I was living with my grandmother at the time and reading lots of poetry. He happened to love Keats who my grandmother also loved, and who I had recently been reading. He had done lots of work on retrieving repressed memories, some of it had been quite controversial in the ’80s and ’90s for his use of hypnotism and electroshock therapy. Anyways, most of my job was reading through old case studies related to this. And many of the cases involved people who when faced with language to recall a memory were unable. The psychoanalyst instead used films he made that would act as prompts to help surface memories.
There was one case that always stuck with me of a man who suffered a brutal homophobic attack by a fountain in Boston Common. He couldn’t recall anything other than the flurry of blows he suffered. After weeks, the man went to the psychoanalyst who put on one of those films in which the sound of running water played, and suddenly the memory rose up in him and he could recall perfectly what had happened, and identify the two men who did it. Language failed, images, sounds worked.
Beyond this experience when I was about sixteen I became very obsessed with Beckett and read everything of his, including his essay on Proust, who I then later read. I return to those two for different reasons: Beckett for the impotence of language, Proust for the tendrils of memory. While I love La Jetée, and I am glad you watched it, the Marker documentary that most influenced Absence was Sans Soleil. There is a line in it which reads something to the effect of: Remembering is the lining of forgetting, not its opposite. That thought was integral to the novel.
NS: There’s so much sitting with the past, with memory, with loss and absence (of course) here—I found it such an intense, all-consuming read. What was it like to live in that atmosphere as you wrote?
IQ: I spent a lot of time in the pub around the time of writing and drafting it. In fact, I drafted and wrote some of its pages in a pub called The Cow in London. I don’t know how I did. I can’t imagine doing that now. I can’t believe I got any work done there.
NS: A lot of your book wonders at the rituals of remembering or forgetting. Do you have rituals of your own, related to writing?
IQ: I just need a blank wall in front of me, a door I can close, and silence. That is all, really. I am not a writer who needs a vista of the Tuscan countryside in front of me or something. I prefer concrete. I also tend to be most productive in the evenings and at night. I have always had trouble sleeping.
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Issa Quincy is a British writer. He spent several years working as a film archivist. His poetry has appeared in The London Magazine and been anthologised by New Rivers Press. His fiction has appeared in Transition Magazine and The Kenyon Review. Absence is his first novel. He is currently based in New York City. (Photo by Jim Larsen.)
