Last Sunday night I picked up Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent. I’ve seen this book everywhere. It is a book that everyone seems to be raving about. It just came out last year, and yet it has been receiving the kind of hype that makes you feel like you’re late to the party if you haven’t already read it. I have to admit, I don’t normally gravitate towards the book everyone is talking about. Part of me thinks, “Everyone else is reading it. I don’t have to.” For whatever reason, if a book sees this kind of popularity I am less inclined to read it. In normal circumstances, I would have given The Correspondent a miss, or else waited a decade before picking it up. But my friend Leslie, who goes by the handle @readerlyjoy over on Instagram, gave this book a glowing review back when it first came out. I trust Leslie’s judgment. If she loves a book, then it is more than likely I will too. And so I started reading this book on Sunday night, just expecting to dip into it before bed, and ended up reading most of it in one sitting. I’m a slow reader. It was a late night. But from the moment I started reading, it was as though I had entered some sort of fugue state. I came to on page 153 to realise I had left a candle burning that should have been extinguished hours ago. Whoops! Perhaps, make sure all open flames have been extinguished before you start reading.
The Correspondent tells the story of Sybil Van Antwerp through letters, mostly ones that she has sent herself, but we are privy to a few of the replies she receives, as well. The letters start 2 June 2012 and end on 15 January 2022, though she has been writing letters her entire life. I have the same hesitancy over epistolary novels as I do short story collections. I seem to think that with each letter I have to recommit to the book. I’m not sure I’ve ever read an epistolary novel that actually made me feel that way. (I guess I must have done. Because how else could I have gotten this crazy idea in my head?) But this most assuredly was not my experience with The Correspondent. See the candle incident.
On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings Sybil sits down to write her letters. She writes for an hour or two at a time, and if she hasn’t finished her correspondence by the end of the week, she writes on Saturdays, too. She writes to her brother, her best friend, her daughter (sporadically), the president of the university where she wants to audit courses, the customer service representative of a DNA testing company, the authors of her favourite books, and she writes an ongoing letter to an unknown person which is never sent. In her professional life Sybil was the clerk to a judge who has recently died. She has been retired for some time, but it’s clear she still misses this part of her life. Long divorced from her husband, she lives alone and rarely sees her two children. Letter writing has always been her preferred way of communicating, helping her to make sense of the world. She reaches out to people many of us would never consider writing to, like Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, and Larry McMurtry.
In a letter to a young girl who interviews Sybil for a school project, she writes, “I write to anyone that strikes me. Friends, lawmakers, editors, teachers, diplomats, authors. Authors are my favorite.” (122)
What I love about this book is that Sybil, who is in her early seventies at the start of the book, is still in the process of becoming the best version of herself. She grows as a person, as a mother, she finds her way to forgiving others, and, so importantly, she finds a path to forgiving herself for something that she has spent decades punishing herself for. This is a book about grief, friendship, falling in love, community, and family, complicated relationships and all the things we try to tell ourselves “don’t really matter”, but in fact matter very much indeed. Sybil isn’t always a likeable person—who is?—but throughout the course of this book she grows. Her life gets bigger. The other lovely thing is that she is surrounded by all of these beautifully flawed people who are figuring it out, too. No one has it all figured out. Not in real life, and not in this book. Communicating, however we can, is a start to forming relationships, but to build bridges sometimes we have to meet people halfway, and be willing to get the words wrong once in a while.
I write slowly. A letter might take me an hour or more. I do not rush. I think through each sentence. My hand does not get tired. You mustn’t rush. When you rush you pen things you didn’t mean and you tire. It takes patience to say exactly what one means, to think of the right word. Sometimes I write a draft and mark it up, then write a clean copy to send. I believe one ought to be precious with communication. Remember: words, especially those written, are immortal. Sometimes, Caroline, the easiest inroad is to begin with a thank you, for a gift or a kindness or a letter, you know, and then take it from there. Answer every question they’ve asked, and ask your own, and you will have created a never-ending circuit of curiosity and learning. (123)
It’s an undeniably romantic way of looking at letter writing, but in some cases Sybil’s preference for writing over other forms of communication keeps people at a distance, as she finds out at the book goes on. We aren’t meant to always find the right word. Being able to communicate is undeniably precious, but we shouldn’t be precious with our communication. Holding our words close is problematic. As someone who can obsess over being properly understood, I can sympathise with Sybil. I also know that keeping my words close has only ever led to greater misunderstanding, in part, because even when you find the right words there is nothing to say that they will be understood in the way you intended them. But that is, perhaps, a conversation for another time.
A year or so ago when I was considering starting a YouTube channel I heard another creative give some advice that resonated with me. I’ve since heard the same idea put a number of different ways, but the gist is, “If your first try is perfect, you waited too long.” I think the same holds true for communication. It’s always lovely to feel you expressed yourself clearly the first time. But if you are constantly seeking perfection in yourself, chances are you are going to expecting it from others, too. And you have got to think, if your primary means of communicating with your friends and loved ones is through letter writing, not just the written word, but letters sent through the post, then it is going to be really hard to get at the deeper issues, as they come up. When one is curating their thoughts into such a tidy narrative, how much is getting left out? Likely all the difficult, messy bits. In the mess lies a certain beauty and quite often the truth of ourselves can be found buried deep below. If we aren’t exposing the mess, we might never find the treasure hiding underneath. At the end of the book, Virginia Evans beautifully handles what this looks like. And it wasn’t until I sat down to write this review that I got that. So yeah, I appreciate this book even more now.
I’ve been away from social media for about five months now to grieve the death of my dog Clark, so I’ve only just discovered The Correspondent won the Women’s Prize for Fiction this year. Unlike some years, I haven’t read all of the titles on the Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist this year, nor the Shortlist, so I cannot weigh-in on the other books, but I will say that I'm not at all surprised The Correspondent won such a prestigious award. It is a remarkable book.
Now, I must hurry off to the library because there are about 103 people queued up for this book. I will be adding The Correspondent to my list of books I want to add to my personal library, because this is one I’ll be returning to, for sure.
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