*So does everyone! Editing to add it’s become a worldwide sensation, Jane Fonda’s playing Sybil in the film, and Virginia won the Women’s Prize for Ficrion 2026!
There are some books which sneak up on you and wrap their tendrils around your heart. Before you realise it, it’s midnight and you are sobbing quietly, trying not to wake the slumbering, as your heart cracks and expands to let the story in.
The Correspondent is such a novel. A novel written in and about letters and life – and what makes a life well lived. The type of book that lets the light in. It has been heralded by Ann Patchett, Clare Chambers, Fran Littlewood, Elinor Lipman… - writers who know.
Indomitable septuagenarian Sybil Van Antwerp writes every day. Letters, emails, notes. To her best friend, Rosalie – the woman who knows her past. To her daughter, with whom she has an uneasy relationship. To her brother, Felix. To Harry – the young son of a former colleague. Emails to a customer service which become rather more. To her favourite writers, like “my friend Joan Didion” and Ann Patchett. Notes to her neighbour, charmingly solicitous Theodore.
As she writes, Sybil and her story unfolds. She is wise, witty, occasionally waspish. The arc of her life stretches into the past, and – marvellously – forward. For whilst she is in the lonely winter of her life, there is the possibility of a second spring. Relationships to be restored, a nascent romance, the possibility of restitution and atonement, and perhaps even the “quieten” the grief which troubles her mind. (Like all the best books, there are secrets here.)
An epistolary novel is a rare and lovely thing in these modern times (she writes, sounding for all the world like a grandmother). I was deeply moved and – if it’s not old fashioned to say it – charmed. So, when Virginia came to London and I had the chance to meet her, up I went to Penguin HQ - where I found a new friend. We talked about our favourite recent reads (she urged me to read Garrett Carr’s The Boy from the Sea; as she was off to Oxford the next day, I championed Joanna Miller’s The Eights). We discussed shared literary heroes and compared notes - Virginia corresponds with Ann Patchett (I know); I have interviewed Elif Shafak and Maggie O’Farrell: “I must meet Maggie O’Farrell before I die,” Virginia told me, earnestly.
We agreed Virginia and her family probably ought to move to the UK: she is a committed anglophile. So much so, she came over to Ireland to study at Trinity, and wanted her novel to be published in the UK “more than I wanted it to be published anywhere else. It had sold in the US and a lot of places, but not here. I kept thinking, ‘please let it sell there’”. And so she must return and travel to Cornwall and walk in the footsteps of Daphne Du Maurier (Rebecca is one of her all-time favourite novels), and come to Winchester (where I live) where we can stroll along the river and my local bookshop, where Jane Austen’s family bought books, and which has a reading lamp which actually reads.
We had coffee, so I suggest you make yourself a hot beverage of your choice, settle down and join us for a chat. And if you want more from me, more authors, more recommendations, just…more, you can subscribe here:
A novel in letters! When I first picked it up, I thought how charmingly old school the idea is. It makes me think of Lady Susan, Richardson's Pamela, or Helen Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road. Was it always going to be epistolary?
I read 84, Charing Cross Road for the first time at the beginning of Covid and I loved the book and wished it was longer, and would go on forever: my brain was so distressed, and reading that book felt like such a gift, because every page is a letter and complete in itself. There’s something so gentle about that that I needed. And whenever I read a book I love, I always think, ‘I could do that’, which is a little bit crazy, but I think there's some madness in this.
I think both 84 Charing Cross Road and The Correspondent are novels about connection. It reminds me of the epigraph ’only connect’ which runs through Howards End.
At its core, that's what The Correspondent is, I think. That's what Sybil is longing for.
She's real to me. I always write what I want to read, and what I want to read is something that is telling a real story, but I don't want to be left devastated: I want a book that when I close it, I am left with a sense of completeness or peace.
This said, I must confess it made me weep. Did you cry whilst you were writing it?
I did - and sometimes I cry when I re-read it!
But there is also hope. Sybil grapples with sadness and grief, but also she gets so much in this last era of her life. I can handle a book where there is sadness, as long as the the arc of it flies, ultimately, towards some kind of salvation.
I love that. And Sybil gets so much in the winter of her life - love, a chance to repair relationships, friendship – it’s like a second spring. I wanted the reader to close the book and feel both things: sadness and joy in the sense of a life well-lived. I feel so happy with how it turned out: I can't quite believe it was exactly what I wanted it to be in the end. I didn't know if I could do that - but could.
It has that Elizabeth Strout-esque quality of seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary: that there is wonder in every life.
If you saw Sybil on the street, at her front door, you’d see her as an old person, but what happens if you go inside the house?
I was really moved by the book Stoner by John Williams. The first page is an obituary of the main character, and it's short, brief and cold: he lived, he died. But then the book is the story of his life. I will never forget reading that book and getting to the last page and just lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, absolutely dazzled. It is John Williams saying, ‘let’s go inside, see what really happened, break open the life, let all of the details spill out’ because that’s what makes people utterly extraordinary.
Did you have The Correspondent perfectly planned out, or did it take turns which surprised you?
The only thing I knew was how it would end, and the event on which her life turns – those were the bookends. Everything else came as I was writing.
It’s enormously assured for a debut, but during my pre-interview deep dive into your life, I discovered you’ve been writing novels for years.
I think it’s my ninth over 20 years (some have morphed into one, so perhaps the eighth complete novel). I just love, love to write. I mean, it's agonising, but I really love to write. The joy is the writing, not the publishing - but I am overjoyed that this one has been published!
And you wrote it in a cupboard?
Yes! My husband was like, ‘You should call this your Harry Potter book’.
I was discouraged: I had been trying and failing to write for so long: I was just really miserable. We were living in a rental, which was a massive open plan space. The bedroom was so small, you had to climb across the bed to get to the other side of the room, but the bathroom was the size of a gymnasium and off the bathroom was our closet [wardrobe]. But the only place you could close the doors in this house is that damn bathroom, so I took my husband's clothes out of the closet, and shoved my little desk inside. I would get up at 4:30am and write until 7am.
I worry this is not a very feminist question, and I’m conscious I probably wouldn't ask it of a male writer (maybe I should?), but perhaps that’s because most men have people to do things for them. But I always think of the Virginia Wolf quote, 'How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom: always the bell rings and the baker calls’. (Persephone Books have a jug with this inscribed upon it and I covet it.)
I need that jug, too!
It seems that you fitted your writing into very small pockets of time, around your family and the metaphorical ringing of bells.
I wouldn't have chosen to do it this way. I would have liked earlier books to succeed and not having to go through all the years of failing and trying and failing. But all those years, I was having this wonderful life: I had the children, so I had to carve out the time in the mornings, but I have that sort of naturally disciplined, even militaristic mind. I always felt that by writing early in the morning, by the time they woke up, my real work was done for the day, so then whatever happened was okay.
I find this all very heartening.
I listened to interview with Elizabeth Strout in which she talked about publishing later in life: she said she used to think, ‘Why can everybody else do this, but I can’t seem to do this’. That gave me hope. And when people compare Sybil to Olive Kitteridge, my heart soars.
Your writing has a very English sensibility.
Somebody else said that to me, that that they would have thought I was English from the writing and the humour. I think British people are quieter, but there's a lot going on in what they say.
Do you think that’s instinctive, or do you think it was informed by your time in Ireland. How did you end up studying there?
The story is the craziest thing that's ever happened in my life. We were living in North Carolina, we both had jobs we didn’t really love, and our children were 3 and 6. One day, my husband came downstairs from putting our daughter to bed, and I said, “Are you happy? Because I don't think we're happy".
Now I can look back and see that in America, it's always about pursuing more, bigger, better: I wanted to take ourselves out of that. I thought my husband would say no, but instead he asked how we’d do it. I had been looking at writing programmes at Trinity, Edinburgh and Manchester, and he said, well, why don't you apply and we'll just see what happens?
I was accepted on all three. We sold our house, quit our jobs, and rented a tiny little apartment in Dublin, sight unseen. We had never been to Ireland before, we don't know anyone there, but I had never felt so good, because I was free. We were really happy and feel we belonged there. When we returned to America, I grieved for over a year. I don't know how to articulate it other than it feels more human to me over here in the UK.
Tell me about being taught by Claire Keegan?
Claire has an intensity that can make her a little hard to approach, but she is so kind, and so generous with her knowledge. She says, ‘I will crack myself open and tell you everything I know. I'm not hoarding it for myself, I want you to know it, too’. Everything she had, she gave to us, every piece of information, every piece of wisdom or knowledge.
Is there anything she taught you that you still think about?
The one thing that that I probably think about every day, is that when you make an incision in time to write, you're choosing a moment in a timeline to cut with a knife and say, the story starts here. What happens if you cut the butter here? What do you have to account for that's behind it, and how do you move forward from it? Or is it better here?
And Claire would always say that you can't think of the people in your stories as characters. If you think of them as characters, they're like puppets. If you're really a storyteller, you're writing about the lives of people, and it doesn't matter that they don't exist.
Sybil writes to her favourite writers – like Joan Didion and Larry McMurty. You are, I know, a letter writer – as in proper pen to paper.
I’ve been writing to Ann Patchett for 10 years. I wrote to her to tell her what I thought of Commonwealth, she wrote back, and we've written infrequently, but consistently ever since. I have some amazing letters from her. She is everything you want her to be. Once I was in Nashville and I walked into her bookstore and she was there, and we chatted for an hour.
I didn't know Ann was reading my book. She read it without me knowing, and then blurbed it. She put it on her Instagram for Parnassus Books, and in the reel, she said “I'm so happy for you” and I knew she was speaking right to me.
You’ve also been praised by Elinor Lipman, who I think is one of our greatest comic writers?
Amy, my editor in America, accidentally forwarded me the entire email exchange that was like 30 emails long, and it was most luxurious experience because I got to read Elinor’s whole experience of this book, which was just so special.
Do you ever have to galvanise yourself to write?
Sometimes I spend days - weeks - piddling around with words, and I have to shock myself into writing. Tell yourself you’re going to write 1500 words a day for a month. It’ll be gruelling, but you could have the whole first draft done. I give myself deadlines and once I am in that tunnel, nothing can stop me. Just get it on the page. You can do nothing without the words on the page. As (novelist) Anne Lamott says, you’re going to write a shitty first draft, and then it's like clay and you can mould it.
What are you writing now?
I'm working on something related to Brideshead Revisited. It’s about a film adaptation of the book, in which a Hollywood actress in her forties has mis-stepped, been cancelled, and needs a way back in. She’s approached about playing Julia in a new adaption of Brideshead, with her ex-lover (who she hasn’t spoken to in years) as Charles… It’s a love story - and that’s what I want right now.
Hence the trip to Oxford. You realise you will need to come back to the UK to do some more research…
Well, I’ve written a letter to the Queen, asking her if she’d like a copy of my book for her bookclub. I think if she read it, she would love it.
Oh, I think it’s right up Camilla’s literary street.
And then I can be at her literary festival. But I'll come over for anything - we could do a festival together?
Virginia, it’s a date. I’ll get the spare room ready.
Get your hands on a copy of The Correspondent. I heartily recommend it.
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Just added it to my "books I want to buy" list! Gorgeous cover! I love epistolary writing and letter writing in general.
I just finished it yesterday! I absolutely loved it (and adored Stoner too). Perfect timing to read your lovely interview 💕