Stephanie Sakia
speaker
113 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 29 Jun
Stephanie Sakia’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
But then when we did sell it to Picador and I was editing it, that following year,
You know, editing actually runs very parallel to grief in terms of taking the good and leaving the bad.
And so it wasn't that I kind of sanitized the character of my Nana, but it did really, really help me to kind of imagine her as she might have been, whilst also being compassionately honest about how she was towards the end.
So, I mean, I found out when I was a teenager and my mum told me when we were just kind of having lunch one day, so it wasn't really a big deal, but
she was keen to stress that when they had told her at a similar age, it was a really big deal.
They had sat her down and said, there's something you need to know.
There's this shameful secret.
And they kind of never spoke of it again until my grandfather was dying.
And then he became really fixated on receiving a pardon from Rome, where it's this very administrative process where you kind of have to apply
And they basically just like, it's paperwork, you know, they rubber stamp you and they're like, okay, you're not a lapsed priest anymore.
You have been laicized again.
You've been made into just an average Joe.
But, you know, it was a piece of paper that came in the mail and three days later he died.
So he was really, really holding out for it.
And because he was so fixated on receiving this pardon, my mum feels that she never got to say goodbye to him properly.
And so I think
I was always very aware that my mum had a lot of secondhand shame and grief that kind of was wrapped around this story.
So it felt like something that was a little bit off limits to me.
I wrote about it a little bit in my first book, which was a book of poetry.
But then as time wore on, I thought, no, this would make a beautiful novel.
Showing 41–60 of 113 · page 3 of 6
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