JWhen I was about to interview this year’s Women’s Prize winner, the first American novelist Virginia Evans, at a drizzly evening party on a London leafy square, we were interrupted because someone wanted to congratulate her. The fan is Richard Curtis.
A warm-hearted cry with a sprinkle of gentle humor, Evans’s award-winning novel The Correspondent is the staple of Curtis. In fact, he is too late. “I think he just wants to be my friend,” Evans jokes politely – Notting Hill is his favorite film of all time. A The Correspondent’s film is already in the pipeline Jane Fonda plays 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp, the laconic correspondent of the title. Evans will be one of the producers and will have a cameo role, “walking the dog or something”.
It’s a far cry from when Evans wrote the novel in a closet in a rented house in North Carolina for nine months during the pandemic in 2020 (she shared her husband’s clothes). She never expected that her story, written entirely in the papers of a former law attorney, would be published, let alone become a word-of-mouth hit that spent 32 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
But the author, who turned 40 earlier this month, did not become an overnight success. Since she was 19, she has been writing for two hours every day between 5 and 7 a.m. and has completed seven unpublished novels before The Correspondent. “It’s my first film,” she says. “But it doesn’t feel like the first child, it feels like the eighth child. It feels like I’ve always done this.”
Over the years, she says, she has received “thousands of rejections” and sent letters to every literary agency in Manhattan “at least once”, before trying out in London and finally finding Canadian agent Hilary McMahon, who believed she had “what it takes”. But still selling The Correspondent was not easy. “It took several months, and there were a lot of silences and a lot of ‘no’s,” she says. “It just felt like rejection and ultimately failure was my thing. And it was for a long time — until it didn’t happen.”
During this time she worked several “paycheck jobs” – including working for a lawyer and a surgeon, and working as a barista – while she raised her two children, Jack, 13, and Mae, 10, without any childcare. When she moved her desk into the closet, she was considering starting law school. But somehow he never gave up. With each rejection, “I thought, ‘Okay, I can do better and I have to do better,'” she says. “If you’re a writer, you can’t do that No Write.”
The form of the novel was inspired by Helen Hanff’s 1970 historical memoir 84 Charing Cross Road, which Evans read in a single day during lockdown. She found it so comfortable that she wished it had lasted longer. So he decided to write a novel in letters, which would take his entire life. John Williams’s 1965 novel Stoner also served as a template for how to transform a seemingly normal life into a quietly heartbreaking fantasy.
Long-divorced mother of three Sybil, eloquent and outspoken, is an unlikely heroine in the mold of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (it’s certainly no accident that the new paperback cover closely resembles Strout’s cover). Past tragedy, late romance, betrayal, revenge and gardening club rivalry are all documented in her correspondence: letters to her childhood friend Rosalie, her brother Felix, a troubled teenager, a Syrian refugee, as well as real-life figures including Ann Patchett, Joan Didion and George Lucas.
“I love any book that plays with format on the page,” Evans says of her decision to tell Sybil’s story in letters. “I think it’s very generous to give your reader a rest for the eyes. There’s something about letters that feels like a trick. You get blown away because the visuals are easy, but the content is no less.”
Despite its warmth and light touch, Evans has described The Correspondent as a book about grief and despair. At the beginning of the novel we learn that Sybil’s son Gilbert died in an accident several years earlier. While she was writing, the six-year-old son of some of her very close friends died. Suddenly she realized what it would be like to lose a child “as close as I could without losing my own.” When she returned to the book, “the echoes of his life and the echoes of the manner of his death and what that does to a family” echoed in every passage. He asked permission from his friends to include Wade in the acceptances. “He read it and said he would be honored,” she says. “When the book came out, it was no big deal. But now it’s all over the world. Her mother comes to me again and again and says, ‘Whenever I see the book somewhere, I just think that these people also know about her existence now.’ So that’s really one of the best things about this success.
Maggie O’Farrell has said that she delayed writing Hamnet, her former Women’s Prize-winning and now Oscar-winning film about Shakespeare’s only son’s death from plague, until her own son was safely past the age at which he died. Evans took the opposite approach – and made Gilbert eight years old, which was the same age as her own son Jack at the time she was writing. He heard an interview with Zadie Smith in which the novelist spoke about the adage that you should write what you know, you should also write what you are afraid of, because they are equally vivid in your mind. “I realized that was absolutely true,” she says. “I could only accurately write about that grief when I was trying to get as close to that thing as I could.”
One of three siblings, Evans grew up in Maryland. This was not a particularly bookish household. But, like Sybil, she has always written letters, especially to writers she admires. Ann Patchett became a pen pal and is now a friend and supporter of the novel. Evans was somewhat uneasy about the fictional letters of Didion and Larry McMurty included in the novel. Both authors responded to fanmail and were careful to ensure that they were based on things they had written. “I love receiving letters,” she says. “It’s like an artwork. I have some letters that are real treasures.” Now he is flooded with letters and has to seek help to answer them all.
Despite all her sadness, she wanted the novel to be “uplifting,” she says, gesturing with her hands. “A lot of books, you get to the end and you think, ‘Oh dear, this is very, very disappointing.'” She thinks this hope may be part of why the novel has gained so much popularity, especially today. She believes that redemption is not fashionable in fiction and worries that it might count against The Correspondent. “It says something really beautiful to me that so many people were willing to entertain my book. A book about hope and a book about forgiveness and a book about grief and despair. These things are so valuable, it makes me feel quite optimistic.”
Its success meant she could eventually write full-time, although she continued to write for two or three hours a day after the children went to school. And she’s come out of the closet: she now has her own room – “a little verandah”. He is well into the making of a new novel, a film. But she is still not able to fully believe in her victory. Recently he asked his agent: “‘Do you think this thing will sell?’ She laughed at me and said, ‘Yes, now it will sell.’ Everything will be sold.”
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The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Penguin Books, £9.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy here guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
