Virginia Evans’ new novel The Correspondent has been a bit of a surprise success to the author. It’s not hard to understand why. There are no shapeshifters or time travelers. No murdered or missing young woman. No culture wars. There’s nothing cozy about the story or the characters either. The protagonist is Sybil, a retired lawyer living alone in a modest house in Maryland. Though of average length, the book takes place over almost ten years and involves at least a dozen plot threads. There is also important backstory, stretching all the way back to Sybil’s birth. That’s a lot for a writer and readers to juggle. To do so within the tight confines of the epistolary form seems almost impossible. Yes, that’s right—aside from a brief preface, the entire novel is told via letters. No dialogue. No descriptive narration. No narrative exposition. No dramatic scenes.
To succeed despite these limitations—which turn out to be advantages—Evans relied on two key structural choices. With one notable exception near the end of the novel, every letter is either written to Sybil or by her, and they are all presented chronologically. Looked at in this way, the novel is a spoke and wheel structure. The form streamlines and animates what might otherwise be a stagnant knot of communications. But Sybil is not merely the hub of the wheel that the dynamic spokes pass through like a location or a shared experience. This is not a novel about different characters on the Titanic. This is indisputably Sybil’s story. The epistolary form brings it to us largely through what Evans calls the “mirrors” of other characters.
Recently I had the pleasure of asking Evans over Zoom how she faced writing the impossible. Answer: she wrote recklessly. The result proves recklessness can be a very, very good thing.
The Rumpus: What came first, the idea to write in the form of letters or wanting to deal with so many subplots and perspectives?
Virginia Evans: It started with the letters and felt like there were a few different ways to do it. You could have two corresponding people like in 84, Charing Cross Road. You could only include outgoing letters, like in The Color Purple or Dear Committee Members by Julie Shoemaker. But I felt like including letters the main character sends as well as some she receives from a variety of corresponding partners allowed me to tell a 360° view of her life. You had to have different people to hold up the mirror at a different angle to Sybil. I’m not a meticulous planner, so I just dove in and as the book unfolded asked myself, “What does the reader need to know and who can Sybil tell it to? Or who can tell something to her?” A book of letters about an old woman runs the risk of being very very boring, so it was a question of how do you move a plot forward. But the book isn’t about a plot, it’s about her whole life. It has to tell the past too. I wanted to braid so many people into the book to show the vastness of her life. If she was just going to write letters to her best friend, you could only cover what was between them. If you wanted to cover her career, her current situation, her love life and who she is as a mentor and a mother, there had to be many other letter writers. For example, because Sybil is retired, to give an understanding of her career, I brought in a high school student doing a report on the judiciary who wants to interview her. There was also always this very fine line, like a dance, to make it believable that these letters are actually ones people would send—older, quainter people mostly.
Rumpus: Our culture has moved from writing often to never writing because we talked on the phone and now we’ve gone back to writing with email and texting. Did having the email option make the book easier to write?
Evans: Yes. Sybil is in her seventies, she’s not a hundred, and she had a career, so she would e-mail, but I didn’t think she ever would text. Email felt like the way to allow more relationships into her life. For example, her Garden Club isn’t going to be calling every member; they’re going to send a group email.
Rumpus: So you invented the characters Sybil corresponds with dynamically, as part of the drafting process, when you needed to provide certain aspects of her life to the reader?
Evans: That’s exactly right. I wanted the story to be a tight ball of yarn even though there were a million strands. It had to be tight to keep a reader’s interest, so there was an element of looping back almost like a coil, reminding the reader all the time of all the things that are happening and all the things that have happened. I did know that all the strands I started with had to bear on the end. Anything you put into the beginning of the book has to matter at the end. That’s something we know instinctually as storytellers. When I was studying with Claire Keegan, she stressed it. Anything you put in the front end of the story has to matter at the back end or it shouldn’t be there at all.
Rumpus: Yet there will always be loose ends. In The Correspondent, some plot threads have to be abandoned, more or less, in medias res. For example, a troubled young man Sybil is helping, goes to college and we don’t know how his life turns out. Sybil’s best friend has a disabled son and a husband with dementia, but her life too persists past the pages of the book. So you have to figure out which plot threads need closure and which don’t.
Evans: If you think of this novel as a TV mini-series, each episode could be centered on one of Sybil’s correspondents. In this book, Sybil is the center, or the sun for the planets. If you went over to Harry’s life, he would be the sun and Sybil a planet. I knew that readers could only receive the edges of the other characters’ stories, their lives as seen in relief against Sybil’s. That’s the fun of it. You could write the same kind of story about each of the other characters, but I chose Sybil to be the center.
Rumpus: This reminds me of Julia Phillips’ Disappearing Earth. I call that a relay novel because she hands the baton of the story off with each chapter to a new protagonist so that person becomes the center.
Evans: In Turbulence, David Szalay does that. The book cover describes it this way: “Twelve passengers move around the globe, twelve individual lives, each in turmoil and each in some way touching the next. They circumnavigate the world in twelve plane journeys from London to Madrid, from Dakar to Sao Paulo, to Toronto, to Delhi, to Doha…” It actually moves in time with these plane trips. A character who is peripheral in one story is the center of the next story. It’s so good and it’s very slim, easy to read.
Rumpus: Did you write a lot of letters that you ended up not using?
Evans: No, I used most of them. In revision I added more than I deleted.
Rumpus: Instead of exposition in dialogue, a common pitfall for newer writers, here I felt the danger was “exposition in letters,” but you never fell into that trap.
Evans: It’s one of the big engines of the way my brain works–asking myself if it feels real. I hate the experience of pulling out of the page and thinking that would never happen or nobody would say that. That’s another Claire Keegan tenet—you’re spinning a world and your reader is trusting you, but if you have even one moment where your reader pulls their head out of the world, looks around their living room and says, “I don’t believe you,” then the whole project is a failure.
Rumpus: I would say the more straightforward your plot chronology is the less you need to rely on chapter labels to do story work. I just read Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods which has one of the more complicated labeling schemes I’ve seen. Though it calls attention to the book as a constructed object, the chapter headings are also very helpful, perhaps indispensable to the reader’s comprehension. They also streamline the writing. Moore didn’t have to clue readers into time shifts within the scene. The chapter headings took care of that. Did you give much thought to the fact that as an epistolary novel, you’re labeling system is built in? Date. Salutation. Closing. Emails are time stamped.
Evans: No. Later somebody mentioned that I didn’t have to create chapter breaks because the letters are the chapters, and that was the first time I had thought about it. As a reader I really enjoy page breaks. I think every reader is reading for that pause, even if you’re completely compelled by the book and going on to the next page right away. Books with long chapters can feel exhausting. We should exercise those muscles and read those kinds of books, but this book—and any epistolary novel—gives the reader more frequent satisfaction. Metaphorically speaking, as you read, you’re holding your breath. When you get a chapter break you get to release it and take a new breath. I think that’s part of the reason my book is appealing to people. It feels easy to get through even if it’s an average length.
Rumpus: There are a lot of plot threads in this novel. Did the epistolary form make it easier or more difficult to include so much?
Evans: I know it’s crazy when you list them.
Rumpus: That’s what’s so impressive about your talent.
Evans: The form did make it easier. In a traditional narrative, once you introduce a plot point and character, you create an expectation in the reader. You’re on the hook for the whole story. But in an epistolary novel, the letters are not the story. The story of these people’s lives is happening outside their letters. For example, when Harry runs away from home, walks to Sybil’s house with his dog, and ends up living with her for six months and helping her with one of her problems, I didn’t have to tell that story. What I told was the story of how Sybil relayed those events to others in her letters. In some ways the book is the scaffolding of a very complex story, but for some reason it’s gratifying. I think it’s because the scaffolding all relates to Sybil, the person you are most interested in. You want to understand why is she so grumpy and weird and tortured? That’s what’s driving you through the story. Using the vehicle of letters also gave me freedom. For example, early in the book she writes to The Baltimore Sun to criticize them for printing a story about a parent who accidentally ran over their child. That is the end of the thread. Nothing more comes of that letter, but it does prove to be an important part of building Sybil for the reader. Another example is learning her neighbor’s Holocaust story. You care about the neighbor because his experiences tell you something about why he and Sybil connect so deeply.
Rumpus: By providing these other character’s stories, you illuminate Sybil without explaining her to us, which might be the book’s core brilliance. It reminds me of a quote in an Emily Dickinson poem.
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Evans: I wouldn’t try to write Sybil’s story directly. I don’t want to read that novel if I’m being honest. I don’t want to have to zoom in on her pain like that. But I do want to tell that story and so it is a question of how I could do it in a way that feels life-affirming. Her age provides that angle. I don’t believe time heals all wounds, but there is something about time that provides a distance and that’s the only angle that I would have ever written this story from.
Rumpus: Did you start with Sybil’s greatest pain?
Evans: Yes. I knew I wanted her to be somebody who had lived with long grief.
Rumpus: In a traditional narrative, an author writes dramatic scenes. They show the big moments, not tell them. With an epistolary novel, it’s the opposite. Everything going on in Sybil’s life at the present moment, including her ongoing grief, occurs “off stage” as I call it. You tell everything, even the big plot points, and you have to tell them slant, through one character relating them to another, or referring to them obliquely because both characters already know about the events. It’s like sex in a novel. Writing it directly is nearly impossible, so we write the lead up and the aftermath. That’s what these letters do. For example, when Sybil tells Theo about her greatest secret, we don’t see that. We infer it by their subsequent letters, and we know how he reacted only by implication. As you were writing, did you think about the advantages and disadvantages of dealing with highly emotional material this way?
Evans: It’s so interesting to talk to people who are reading the book critically because as a writer I’m just trying to tell a good story and figure out what makes you want to keep reading. I only see that I’m working via scaffolding or telling a story off-stage in hindsight. It’s more evident to me now that it was a challenging thing to attempt. I’ve written traditional books before, so this was definitely something new, but I didn’t think too hard about it. I just dove in and tried to find my way through. I definitely had some critical reads from people I trust that I had to move things around, the timing of certain things had to change. It wasn’t like it came together magically on the first try, but I try really hard not to overthink because then I’d get scared and wouldn’t write at all.
Rumpus: At the end of the book, readers get to see a letter Sybil tried to write but never sent. It’s key emotionally to bringing the book to a close. Can you tell me a little about how that came about?
Evans: I’m pretty sure that’s how I ended the first draft. I wanted to show something that felt like a new revelation on the last page, which turned out to be how Sybil labored over her letters, crossed out and fixed words. It leaves you with the question of whether she did that with all her letters. It showed her humanity from another angle. In the finished letters she is articulate and put together, so sure of who she is, but that letter shows she was afraid and working hard to make her image. Her life was long and things turned out in some ways well, but I didn’t want to end that way. I wanted the last taste in your mouth to be the grief she had to live with. It was always going to be both joy and sorrow. That’s how life really is.
Rumpus: Sybil reads novels and corresponds with some real-life writers, including Joan Didion. How did you have the courage to write letters in Didion’s voice?
Evans: That’s the best question I’ve been asked. After we sold it, I asked, “Is this okay?” It’s legally permitted because she’s deceased. I haven’t had any fallout from readers, but I’ve said in interviews: “What kind of asinine craziness is it to write as Joan Didion?” I did it originally because I didn’t think I was going to show this book to anyone. I wasn’t planning on giving it to my agent or selling it, so I wrote recklessly about a lot of things, including writing in the voice of a Syrian refugee.
Rumpus: Maybe the epistolary form helped. Basam, the Syrian refugee, isn’t the main character so you’re not getting deep into his life experience. You are only imagining what he might write in a narrow context to Sybil.Evans: Right. These days fiction writers are terrified to write things that are not our own personal life experience, which I think is a problem in the current landscape. Should I only write about white women in their 30s for the rest of my life? How boring. But that’s my life experience. Not thinking I would show this book to anyone gave me the guts to do a lot of things I probably wouldn’t have done if I felt like somebody was reading over my shoulder,which is a life lesson for me—just write freely.
