The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

Synopsis:

A woman tries to heal old wounds and make sense of the world the only way she knows how—through letters—in this charming, laugh out loud debut novel about a life fully lived.

"There is a movie coming out this month and I saw the trailer and it made me think of you. It’s about an old woman who lives alone like a hermit. She is eccentric and rude…."

Sybil Van Antwerp is a mother and grandmother, divorced, retired from a distinguished career in law, an avid gardener, and a writer of letters. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books.

Because at seventy-three, Sybil has used her letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. But as Sybil expects her life to go on as it always has, letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life.

Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel that is a testament to the power of the written word.

• The vague and intermittent nature of her developing blindness bothered me, because I couldn’t place it; is it meant to be real? The condition is never named (unless I missed something), and I’m not familiar with it. It’s not really my area, of course — but on the other hand I did volunteer for the RNIB and it started out with some education around the types of blindness people in the clinic I’d be working in were dealing with. Nothing rang a bell. I’m curious, darn it! It made me worry it was more of a plot device than anything, and that sat oddly with everything else.
• Quite a bit of time passes between the letters. It took me a while to realise there were gaps, that we weren’t being shown the whole correspondence — sometimes I’d turn back trying to remember where something had been previously mentioned, but it hadn’t been. Dates orient most people, of course, but I don’t really log them in my brain even if I try. Gaaah. So this might’ve been a personal issue rather than a general one, though I think the gaps might sometimes confuse people (e.g. letter where a question get asked are omitted and we only see the answer).
• The letters “from” real people like Joan Didion. It felt a little like RPF (real person fanfiction), which has always sat quite oddly with me.