Nicosia, Cyprus. Matthew Philip Long has described how grief, memory and questions of belonging shaped his debut novella, Life Goes on Without You and Me, which is set in Cyprus and will be launched on June 26. Long said the book began as private diary entries written as he returned to the island after his mother’s death.
A book born from personal loss
Long said there was initially no plan to publish the work.
“There was never any intention for anyone else to read it,” he said. “It started off as diary entries when I started traveling back and forth to Cyprus a couple years after my mum died. I decided to try and find something of her to kind of cling on to; I brought a camera with me and some notebooks, and started making journal entries about feelings.”
He said he finished writing the book about 18 months ago and is now trying to return to the mindset in which it was written as the launch approaches.
“This book was about trying to understand my own grief, and also to create a language for it,” Long said. “I don’t think I had the tools to speak about grief openly and that’s what the diary entries were for, and that’s what this became. It became creating my own language to understand grief and the loss of what my mother meant to me, what Cyprus and the role it played in her life meant to both of us.”
Family history and Cyprus
Long was born in Ayios Nikolaos, Dhekelia, one of Cyprus’ British military bases. He said his father was a British soldier and his mother had moved to the island from the UK with him.
“My dad was a British soldier here, and my mom moved here with him from the UK. I was a child of a military family,” he said.
Although the family spent only a few years on the island, Long said Cyprus remained central to his childhood through his mother’s memories and affection for the country.
“I have no memories of Cyprus,” he said. “But what I do have, and I guess where the desire to find a connection with the island came from, is its memories lived through another; my mom used to talk to me about Cyprus all the time and in such a loving way. It was a happy time in her life.”
He said that instead of bedtime stories, his mother would often show him family photo albums from their time in Cyprus.
From photography project to novella
Long said he returned to Cyprus about 30 years later after his mother’s death, initially planning a photography project based on old family photographs.
“It started off as more of a photo project, I came with a bunch of the photos from the albums, and I was using a camera to try and recreate those images, those memories, desperately trying to make those memories mine,” he said. “But the writing just took over.”
He said that as he continued writing, he found healing in the process and began to think the work might resonate with others.
Long said his mother died three weeks after the family learned she was terminally ill.
“We found out that she was terminally ill, and she died three weeks later. It all happened very quickly,” he said. “When someone dies, you’re also mourning for a part of you that you’ve lost; mourning for when before my mom got sick, that version of me no longer exists.”
Searching for connection and confronting history
Long said the book’s conclusion reflects his realization that he could not claim a connection that was not his own.
“The end of the book is the realisation that I was desperately clinging to something that doesn’t belong to me, and I needed to let that go,” he said. “I would say that the connection to Cyprus is essential to the book, but it could have been anywhere.”
He said research into Cypriot history, particularly British colonial history, became an important part of the writing process.
“That became tied to my journey, not only reclaiming memories, trying to find connection, understanding home, and belonging in a country, but a place that has been so scarred by colonial history, and I was born here because of colonialism and colonial legacy,” he said.
Long said that spending time on the island, speaking to people and observing its physical landscape helped him better understand what it means to be British in Cyprus.
He added that the process also forced him to confront the limits of his search for belonging.
“Part of it was also trying to understand, or trying to come to terms with the fact that again, I was searching, and how I was using grief to find a home, belonging, and a connection that can never happen,” he said. “I’m not Cypriot, I have no ties or connection to this island.”
