Virginia Evans is the author of the new novel The Correspondent. She lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Q: What inspired you to write The Correspondent, and how did you create your character Sybil Van Antwerp?
A: First, I read the book 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, and was inspired by the letter format. I wanted to try to write a book that way. Then it was a matter of what type of person would write enough letters to make a story?
I’d made the acquaintance of a woman whose house I was interested in purchasing. When I went to see the house and meet her, we spent a brief hour chatting. She was very interesting, lived alone, had been married, her children were grown.
She had stunning, interesting art on the walls, music playing, lovely little things collected over a life, and as we chatted she dropped little things, like breadcrumbs, little details from her life. I thought she was fascinating, lovely, classic. She planted the little seeds in the ground that became Sybil, and eventually this book.
Q: Can you say more about why you decided to write an epistolary novel?
A: I found the letter format to be very digestible when I read it myself—Guernsey, Dear Committee Members, even Gilead. So much can be said with directness. I liked that, and I wanted to try it myself, but I wanted the specific kind of book I was wanting to read. Something warm, expansive, total.
Q: The writer Ann Patchett said of the book, "Subtly told and finely made, The Correspondent is a portrait of a small life expanding." What do you think of that description?
A: When I first read Ann's blurb of the book I was floored. I felt she was able to capture it perfectly and succinctly. I think she was right that the book is a portrait of a life.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: The ending was really my starting point. I knew the way I wanted it to end, so the rest was kind of writing toward that. I didn't know much of the middle, other than a few pieces of Sybil's life history. I definitely made changes from draft to draft, but the ending never changed.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Now I'm at work on a contemporary novel set between England, Scotland, and Los Angeles! Hoping to have the first draft finished in a few months.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I've just finished rereading The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, which to me is a meditation on summer and life, and one I like to return to. I think I ought to read it every summer!
Other books like this for me are A Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan around Christmas. I like the idea of returning to books yearly, seasonally, almost like liturgies.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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