No other book released in the past year has had the slow-burning path to fame that The Correspondent by Virginia Evans has. The book released around April last year and by December became the novel you ought to have read already. Its number one spot on The New York Times bestseller list and an endorsement by Ann Patchett (who called the novel a “unicorn”) might have helped too.
The Correspondent is a novel in the form of letters that its 73-year-old protagonist, Sybil Van Antwerp, writes and receives. Sybil, a retired lawyer and legal clerk, spends her days corresponding with her children, her best friend, a customer service executive at a gene testing company, her brother, the teenage son of a friend, the dean of a college who keeps refusing to allow her to audit a course, the editor of a newspaper whom she accuses of insensitivity… There are also letters to literary figures like Ann Patchett (with whom Evans has a real-life pen pal relationship), Joan Didion, and Larry McMurtry, among others.
We’re no strangers to the epistolary novel—there’s Jean Webster’s classic coming-of-age novel Daddy-Long-Legs; the devastating exploration of motherhood and ambiguity in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin; the worldly, thinking friends of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You; the dual narrators of Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage; and the kooky charm of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette. We’re familiar with the sense of freedom that comes with putting pen to paper to get our thoughts out and what that allows us to do and be. In The Correspondent, the letters are a pathway for conversation and a way to preserve memory as well as a tool of distance and avoidance. In the letters there is love, camaraderie, and concern, but so are prejudices, petty quarrels, guilt, anger, and resentment. Sybil’s inner life unfolds through the letters. We get to know her and love her—even if we don’t always like her. Amidst the letters Sybil dispatches, there are also some unsent letters that we encounter repeatedly, the mystery of which is solved only much later in the story.
When Evans and I speak, Evans is in London (she’s otherwise based in North Carolina); it’s right after the day The Correspondent was announced on the longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, alongside Katie Kitamura, Susan Choi, Megha Majumdar, and Lily King, among others. Here, the author discusses her long journey in publishing, letter writing, her first novel that’s also her eighth novel, and the literary greats you will encounter between the pages of The Correspondent, the March pick of The Nod Book Club.
In one of your interviews, you mentioned that writing The Correspondent felt like a palate cleanser. Could you tell us what you meant by that?
I had finished one book and was thinking about writing another one. It was just one of these things where I started this exercise of letters. The writing of a long literary novel is such a heavy, dense process. It can feel very stodgy or like a sort of plodding through the story. So, there was something that felt very light about writing the book in letters. The form felt so different and it felt—if not easier—lighter, I guess.
In that way, it felt like a palate cleanser. It also felt like what came into The Correspondent was a lot of my own life and a lot of my own feelings and my state of mind. And so, in some ways, it felt like getting those things out.
How did you proceed with structuring the novel? Did you go chronologically, or did you have to go back and fill in gaps in Sybil’s life story, which in this case had to be told in letters only? For instance, it’s through her letters that we get biographical details about her: where she grew up, her adoptive parents…
There’s probably a little bit of both, but it felt really important to make sure that there was never a moment where, as the reader, you would read a letter and think, oh, the author is just saying that there so that we will know that information. It felt really important to find a way to communicate the information in a way that felt authentic, that that information would come out naturally.
I remember there was a moment where I had this really strong feeling about what Sybil was as a child. And I hadn’t had that in the book before, and I thought, oh, that’s so interesting. There’s a letter she is writing to Harry Landy, this teenage boy, and she says, you asked what I was like as a child. And it’s funny because I remember that letter and those thoughts of hers coming to me pretty fully formed in my mind. And then it was just a matter of whether there was a way to introduce this to the story. Or maybe there was no way to have her tell that in a way that is authentic. Harry is trying to find an understanding of himself as a child and he doesn’t understand why he feels like he doesn’t fit in the world or that he’s different. And he feels such a camaraderie with Sybil that it did feel natural that he would ask her that question.
The headline of a recent interview with you called The Correspondent the “feel-good novel of the year”. While there’s a lot of warmth and wit and camaraderie in the novel, there’s also a rather strong thread of grief in the book. What is your reaction when someone calls your book “feel-good”?
I’m happy that’s how people feel. I don’t know if everybody feels that way, but I do think the novel is very balanced in a way. There is sorrow and also joy and love and friendship and richness of relationships; I think what all of us, if we move through life, want is to have a richness in relationships. And there is so much of that in this book.
The letters are, in some ways, evidence of a life full of relationships, but on the other hand, of course, there’s the flip side, which is that letters are also a way of distancing yourself. That’s not a relationship in person, that’s not having someone beside you or holding your hand or in your house or at the lunch table. Then, of course, there’s the grief and sorrow.
So, it is interesting to me when people say to me how good it feels to read the book, even if they cried, or even if they felt very sad at certain times. Maybe there’s something that feels good about the way the novel tells the whole story, because it feels relatable. So, I think that’s what people mean when they say it feels good. It’s not like a book that is just a kind of jubilant love story, but also, I don’t know if those books make you feel deeply either. A book that’s just joyful doesn’t make you feel as deeply as a book that balances those things.
The Correspondent is also a book of readers, whether it’s Sybil firing off letters to the likes of CS Lewis, Joan Didion, and Larry McMurtry (and getting replies from them) or Sybil and Rosalie always ending their letters to each other with a note on what they’re reading. There are references to Louise Erdrich, Tolkien, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Stieg Larsson… What do these writers mean to you?
It’s funny how people read so much into that reading list! What are these books and why did she choose them? I genuinely just chose books that I love, pretty much. Not every single book, though; there are a few books that are in the novel that sort of worked for the story or provided comedic relief. I don’t know how many books there are. Between what Sybil and Rosalie discuss and what Sybil discusses with Melissa Genet, the professor at the college, I think the number of books listed in the novel is something in the 30s. I would say probably 27 out of 30 would be novels that I just love.
There’s a hilarious bit about Outlander and Sybil’s reaction to all the sex in the book…
Yeah, it was funny. I mean, when she found out that was where she was from—Scotland—it was picture-perfect.
The Correspondent is technically the eighth book you’ve written, though it’s the first one that’s been published. You’ve had a long journey in writing. With the success of The Correspondent now, is there any chance that you would go back and revisit your older books?
Yes, there’s a part of me that thinks I might go back. It doesn’t feel simple, though. It doesn’t feel like I would just start sending off books [I’ve written previously]. It would be a huge undertaking to go back in. You spend however many years writing a novel. It’s so braided in with your life and what you were doing at that time. Each novel is also a signifier of how old my children were, or where we lived, or what was happening in our lives. So, it feels like an emotional experience to go back in. I would need to go back and sort of remember and make sure that I still like it and think it’s good. And I know that this would be true of The Correspondent too; if I went back with an editing brain, I would change it.
When I think about going back to a book, my sixth or seventh book are the two that I would probably be more interested in looking back at. It feels like a little daunting, and I think, as a writer, at least for me, it’s always a forward motion. I finished writing The Correspondent in 2022. Then I’m done. I’m closing the door. It’s like with every book you opened up a new room in your house and you filled it. And then at the end, you close the door and you never go back in. There’s no reason to go back. I’m working on something else, and it’s what energises me—writing something new.
That said, both of those books I am proud of. I think they’re very good. They’re part of the list of books I’ve written, even though to the wider world there’s one book that I’ve written and my next book will be my second book. But to me, the next book I’m writing is my ninth book.
Could you hint at where you’re going with your next one?
It’s modern. So, it’s like The Correspondent. It is about the making of a movie.
How was the experience of studying creative writing under the likes of Claire Keegan when you went to Trinity College in Dublin for your Master’s?
It was wonderful. The whole faculty there is so good, and the programme is so good. I’m not somebody who was in the world of books and publishing and creative writing programmes. I didn’t really understand how great it was going to be. And I have nothing to compare it to, but in Ireland there is a generosity of spirit with everyone that I don’t actually think this is going to be true everywhere; I don’t know if this is true in the US.
In Ireland, there’s no withholding, there’s no hoarding what you know. It’s not like, I have my secrets, but I’ll tell you some things, but some things I won’t tell you because it’s mine. The generosity of spirit from my professors was, everything I know about fiction, everything I know about writing, I will give you. If you’re willing to listen, if you’re willing to humble yourself and be taught, then they’re willing to give all that they have.
Claire was visiting that year. I just look back on that in wonder, and I think I was so fortunate and blessed to have that year. And then there was the full-time faculty there—Carlo Gebler, Eoin McNamee, Kevin Power, Harry Clifton, Dierdre Madden. All iconic, amazing Irish writers who are saying, all that I have is yours. I think I was the most fortunate person in the world to end up there in that little group of 12 or 16. It was so small and so sacred to me.
What are the books that have shaped you as a writer?
If I am thinking about that, it’s a matter of fiction that opened my mind to a space that I didn’t know. I remember reading The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck in high school and thinking, oh, this is what you can do. That was the first book I ever read that made me want to write a book like that. When I discovered Ann Patchett and Maggie O’Farrell, I was discovering this fiction that is smart and literary but so enjoyable. And that felt like a revelation. There’s easy books and then there’s classics. And I was starting to learn that there was this in-between space that was a kind of this mixing of those. I remember reading Kiran Desai and feeling that there was something else that was lurking in my head. Then there’s John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing and Stoner, Sarah Gruen’s Water for Elephants… I’m just thinking about books that felt so smart but so wonderful to read. And reading good books is the best training for writing. Every time you read a good book, it’s this education on storytelling.
Do you have a favourite epistolary novel?
Yeah, I love 84, Charing Cross Road and The Color Purple.
The Correspondent came out last year, but the buzz around it built slowly, through word of mouth and that Ann Patchett endorsement. Do you remember the exact moment when you suddenly realised that, okay, this is big?
I know it started to kind of grow in the fall. And then I think it hit The New York Times bestseller list around November. And those moments felt like, oh, okay, that’s great! Again, it was me being somebody who doesn’t really know what everything means or being like, okay, great, it’s on The New York Times bestseller list. And then my team was freaking out. That was really special. Then I think it was on New Year’s Day and I was on Good Morning America. And that felt like a bizarre life experience, to be on television. It was just that I didn’t have any ambition to be on television. It took a lot out of me—getting ready, the intensity of it. And so that might have been the moment that I thought, this is crazy. Like, why am I on television? And since then, there have been more things like that where it just feels like this is wild. But that was probably the first one where I’m like, “Why am I flying to New York City to be on television? Okay, I guess it’s the book.”
The Nod Book Club’s March pick, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, is published by Penguin; ₹440
